THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 


IAN  MACLAREN 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 
AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 


BY 

IAN  MACLAREN 

AUTHOR  OF  "  BESIDE  THE  BONNIE  BRIAR  BUSH,"  "  AULD 
LANG  SYNE."  "KATE  CARNEGY."  ETC.,  ETC. 


Ml 


HODDER  &  STOUGHTON 

NEW  YORK 

GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


Copyright,   1912, 
By  George  H.  Doran  Company 


CoHeC0 
Ubraiy 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Books  and  Bookmen    .,..,..,.,.       i 
Humour  :  AN  Analysis  .     ,.     ,.     .     .     .     45 

Robert  Burns 91 

The  Waverley  Novels     .     ,.;     .     ■..    ,.   127 


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BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 


Books  and  Bookmen 

THEY  cannot  be  separated   any  more 
than  sheep  and  a  shepherd,  but  I  am 
minded    to    speak    of    the    bookman 
rather  than  of  his  books,  and  so  it  will  be  best 
at  the  outset  to  define  the  tribe. 

It  does  not  follow  that  one  is  a  bookman 
because  he  has  many  books,  for  he  may  be  a 
book  huckster  or  his  books  may  be  those  with- 
out which  a  gentleman's  library  is  not  com- 
plete. And  in  the  present  imperfect  arrange- 
ment of  life  one  may  be  a  bookman  and  yet 
have  very  few  books,  since  he  has  not  the 
wherewithal  to  purchase  them.  It  is  the 
foolishness  of  his  kind  to  desire  a  loved  au- 
thor in  some  becoming  dress,  and  his  fastidi- 
ousness to  ignore  a  friend  in  a  four-pence- 
halfpenny  edition.  The  bookman,  like  the 
poet,  and  a  good  many  other  people,  is  born 
and  not  made,  and  my  grateful  memory  re- 
tains an  illustration  of  the  difference  between 
a  bookowner  and  a  bookman  which  I  think  is 
apropos.    As  he  was  to  preside  at  a  lecture  I 


2  BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

was  delivering  he  had  in  his  courtesy  invited 
me  to  dinner,  which  was  excellent,  and  as  he 
proposed  to  take  the  role  that  night  of  a  man 
who  had  been  successful  in  business,  but  yet 
allowed  himself  in  leisure  moments  to  trifle 
with  literature,  he  desired  to  create  an  atmos- 
phere, and  so  he  proposed  with  a  certain  im- 
posing air  that  we  should  visit  what  he  called 
"  my  library."  Across  the  magnificence  of 
the  hall  we  went  in  stately  procession,  he  first, 
with  that  kind  of  walk  by  which  a  surveyor  of 
taxes  could  have  at  once  assessed  his  income, 
and  I,  the  humblest  of  the  bookman  tribe,  fol- 
lowing in  the  rear,  trembling  like  a  skiff  in 
the  wake  of  an  ocean  liner.  "There,"  he 
said,  with  his  thumbs  in  the  armholes  of  his 
waistcoat,  "  what  do  you  think  of  that? " 
And  that  was  without  question  a  very  large 
and  ornate  and  costly  mahogany  bookcase 
with  glass  doors.  Before  I  saw  the  doors  I 
had  no  doubt  about  my  host,  but  they  were  a 
seal  upon  my  faith,  for  although  a  bookman 
is  obliged  to  have  one  bit  of  glass  in  his  gar- 
den for  certain  rare  plants  from  Russia  and 
Morocco,  to  say  nothing  of  the  gold  and  white 
vellum  lily  upon  which  the  air  must  not  be 
allowed   to   blow,   especially  when   charged 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN  3 

with  gas  and  rich  in  dust,  yet  he  hates  this 
conservatory,  just  as  much  as  he  loves  its  con- 
tents. His  contentment  is  to  have  the  flowers 
laid  out  in  open  beds,  where  he  can  pluck  a 
blossom  at  will.  As  often  as  one  sees  the 
books  behind  doors,  and  most  of  all  when  the 
doors  are  locked,  then  he  knows  that  the 
owner  is  not  their  lover,  who  keeps  tryst  with 
them  in  the  evening  hours  when  the  work  of 
the  day  is  done,  but  their  jailer,  who  has 
bought  them  in  the  market-place  for  gold, 
and  holds  them  in  this  foreign  place  by  force. 
It  has  seemed  to  me  as  if  certain  old  friends 
looked  out  from  their  prison  with  appealing 
glance,  and  one  has  been  tempted  to  break  the 
glass  and  let,  for  instance,  Elia  go  free.  It 
would  be  like  the  emancipation  of  a  slave. 
Elia  was  not,  good  luck  for  him,  within  this 
particular  prison,  and  I  was  brought  back 
from  every  temptation  to  break  the  laws  of 
property  by  my  chairman,  who  was  still  pur- 
suing his  catechism.  "  What,"  was  question 
two,  ^*  do  you  think  I  paid  for  that?  "  It  was 
a  hopeless  catechism,  for  I  had  never  pos- 
sessed anything  like  that,  and  none  of  my 
friends  had  in  their  homes  anything  like  that, 
and  in  my  wildest  moments  I  had  never  asked 


4  BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

the  price  of  such  a  thing  as  that.  As  it 
loomed  up  before  me  in  its  speckless  respecta- 
bility and  insolence  of  solid  wealth  my  Eng- 
lish sense  of  reverence  for  money  awoke,  and 
I  confessed  that  this  matter  was  too  high  for 
me;  but  even  then,  casting  a  glance  of  depre- 
cation in  its  direction,  I  noticed  that  was  al- 
most filled  by  a  single  work,  and  I  wondered 
what  it  could  be.  "  Cost  £80  if  it  cost  a 
penny,  and  I  bought  it  second-hand  in  perfect 
condition  for  £17,  5s.,  with  the  books  thrown 
in  —  All  the  Year  Round  from  the  beginning 
in  half  calf;"  and  then  we  returned  in  pro- 
cession to  the  drawing-room,  where  my  pa- 
tron apologised  for  our  absence,  and  ex- 
plained that  when  two  bookmen  got  together 
over  books  it  was  difficult  to  tear  them  away. 
He  was  an  admirable  chairman,  for  he  occu- 
pied no  time  with  a  review  of  literature  in  his 
address,  and  he  slept  without  being  noticed 
through  mine  (which  is  all  I  ask  of  a  chair- 
man), and  so  it  may  seem  ungrateful,  but  in 
spite  of  "  that "  and  any  books,  even  Spenser 
and  Chaucer,  which  that  might  have  con- 
tained, this  Maecenas  of  an  evening  was  not  a 
bookman. 

It  is  said,  and  now  I  am  going  to  turn  the 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN  5 

application  of  a  pleasant  anecdote  upside 
down,  that  a  Colonial  squatter  having  made 
his  pile  and  bethinking  himself  of  his  soul, 
wrote  home  to  an  old  friend  to  send  him  out 
some  chests  of  books,  as  many  as  he  thought 
fit,  and  the  best  that  he  could  find.  His 
friend  was  so  touched  by  this  sign  of  grace  that 
he  spent  a  month  of  love  over  the  commission, 
and  was  vastly  pleased  when  he  sent  off,  in 
the  best  editions  and  in  pleasant  binding,  the 
very  essence  of  English  literature.  It  was  a 
disappointment  that  the  only  acknowledg- 
ment of  his  trouble  came  on  a  postcard,  to  say 
that  the  consignment  had  arrived  in  good  con- 
dition. A  year  afterwards,  so  runs  the  story, 
he  received  a  letter  which  was  brief  and  to  the 
point.  "  Have  been  working  over  the  books, 
and  if  anything  new  has  been  written  by  Wil- 
liam Shakespeare  or  John  Milton,  please  send 
it  out."  I  believe  this  is  mentioned  as  an  in- 
stance of  barbarism.  It  cannot  be  denied  that 
it  showed  a  certain  ignorance  of  the  history 
of  literature,  which  might  be  excused  in  a 
bushman,  but  it  also  proved,  which  is  much 
more  important,  that  he  had  the  smack  of  let- 
ters in  him,  for  being  turned  loose  without  the 
guide  of  any  training  in  this  wide  field,  he 


6  BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

fixed  as  by  instinct  on  the  two  classics  of  the 
English  tongue.  With  the  help  of  all  our 
education,  and  all  our  reviews,  could  you  and 
I  have  done  better,  and  are  we  not  every  day, 
in  our  approval  of  unworthy  books,  doing 
very  much  worse.  Quiet  men  coming  home 
from  business  and  reading,  for  the  sixth  time, 
some  noble  English  classic,  would  smile  in 
their  modesty  if  any  one  should  call  them 
bookmen,  but  in  so  doing  they  have  a  sounder 
judgment  in  literature  than  coteries  of  clever 
people  who  go  crazy  for  a  brief  time  over  the 
tweetling  of  a  minor  poet,  or  the  preciosity 
of  some  fantastic  critic. 

There  are  those  who  buy  their  right  to  citi- 
zenship in  the  commonwealth  of  bookmen, 
but  this  bushman  was  free-born,  and  the  sign 
of  the  free-born  is,  that  without  critics  to  aid 
him,  or  the  training  of  a  University,  he  knows 
the  difference  between  books  which  are  so 
much  printed  stuff  and  a  good  book  which  is 
"  the  Precious  life-blood  of  a  Master  Spirit.'* 
The  bookman  will  of  course  upon  occasion 
trifle  with  various  kinds  of  reading,  and  there 
is  one  member  of  the  brotherhood  who  has  a 
devouring  thirst  for  detective  stories,  and  has 
always  been  very  grateful  to  the  creator  of 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN  7 

Sherlock  Holmes.  It  is  the  merest  pedantry 
for  a  man  to  defend  himself  with  a  shamed 
face  for  his  light  reading:  it  is  enough  that 
he  should  be  able  to  distinguish  between  the 
books  which  come  and  go  and  those  which 
remain.  So  far  as  I  remember,  The  Mystery 
of  a  Hansom  Cab  and  John  Inglesant  came 
out  somewhat  about  the  same  time,  and  there 
were  those  of  us  who  read  them  both;  but 
while  we  thought  the  Hansom  Cab  a  very  in- 
genious plot  which  helped  us  to  forget  the  te- 
dium of  a  railway  journey,  I  do  not  know  that 
there  is  a  copy  on  our  shelves.  Certainly  it 
is  not  lying  between  The  Ordeal  of  Richard 
Fever  el  and  The  Mayor  of  Casterbridge. 
But  some  of  us  venture  to  think  that  in  that 
admirable  historical  romance  which  moves 
with  such  firm  foot  through  both  the  troubled 
England  and  the  mysterious  Italy  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  Mr.  Shorthouse  won  a 
certain  place  in  English  literature. 

When  people  are  raving  between  the  soup 
and  fish  about  some  popular  novel  which  to- 
morrow will  be  forgotten,  but  which  doubt- 
less, like  the  moths  which  make  beautiful  the 
summer-time,  has  its  purpose  in  the  world  of 
speech,  it  gives  one  bookman  whom  I  know 


B  BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

the  keenest  pleasure  to  ask  his  fair  companion 
whether  she  has  read  Mark  Rutherford,  He 
is  proudly  conscious  at  the  time  that  he  is  a 
witness  to  perfection  in  a  gay  world  which  is 
content  with  excitement,  and  he  would  be 
more  than  human  if  he  had  not  in  him  a  touch 
of  the  literary  Pharisee.  She  has  not  read 
Mark  Rutherford,  and  he  does  not  advise  her 
to  seek  it  at  the  circulating  library,  be- 
cause it  will  not  be  there,  and  if  she  got  it 
she  would  never  read  more  than  ten  pages. 
Twenty  thousand  people  will  greedily  read 
Twice  Murdered  and  Once  Hung  and  no 
doubt  they  have  their  reward,  while  only 
twenty  people  read  Mark  Rutherford;  but 
then  the  multitude  do  not  read  Twice  Mur- 
dered twice,  while  the  twenty  turn  again  and 
again  to  Mark  for  its  strong  thinking  and  its 
pure  sinewy  English  style.  And  the  children 
of  the  twenty  thousand  will  not  know  Twice 
Murdered,  but  the  children  of  the  twenty, 
with  others  added  to  them,  will  know  and  love 
Mark  Rutherford.  Mr.  Augustine  Birrell 
makes  it,  I  think,  a  point  of  friendship  that  a 
man  should  love  George  Borrow,  whom  £ 
think  to  appreciate  is  an  excellent  but  an  ac- 
quired taste;  there  are  others  who  would  pro- 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN  9 

pose  Mark  Rutherford  and  the  Revelation  in 
Tanner^s  Lane  as  a  sound  test  for  a  bookman's 
palate.  But  .  .  .  de  gustibus  .  .  .  ! 
It  is  the  chief  office  of  the  critic,  while  en- 
couraging all  honest  work  which  either  can 
instruct  or  amuse,  to  distinguish  between  the 
books  which  must  be  content  to  pass  and  the 
books  which  must  remain  because  they  have 
an  immortality  of  necessity.  According  to 
the  weightiest  of  French  critics  of  our  time 
the  author  of  such  a  book  is  one  "  who  has  en- 
riched the  human  mind,  who  has  really  added 
to  its  treasures,  who  has  got  it  to  take  a  step 
further  .  .  .  who  has  spoken  to  all  in  a 
style  of  his  own,  yet  a  style  which  finds  itself 
the  style  of  everybody,  in  a  style  that  is  at  once 
new  and  antique,  and  is  the  contemporary  of 
all  the  ages."  Without  doubt  Sainte-Beuve 
has  here  touched  the  classical  quality  in  litera- 
ture as  with  a  needle,  for  that  book  is  a  classic 
to  be  placed  beside  Homer  and  Virgil  and 
Dante  and  Shakespeare  —  among  the  immor- 
tals—  which  has  wisdom  which  we  cannot 
find  elsewhere,  and  whose  form  has  risen 
above  the  limitation  of  any  single  age.  While 
ordinary  books  are  houses  which  serve  for  a 
generation  or  two  at  most,  this  kind  of  book 


10         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

is  the  Cathedral  which  towers  above  the 
building  at  its  base  and  can  be  seen  from  afar, 
in  which  many  generations  shall  find  their 
peace  and  inspiration.  While  other  books  are 
like  the  humble  craft  which  ply  from  place  to 
place  along  the  coast,  this  book  is  as  a  stately 
merchantman  which  compasses  the  great 
waters  and  returns  with  a  golden  argosy. 

The  subject  of  the  book  does  not  enter  into 
the  matter,  and  on  subjects  the  bookman  is 
very  catholic,  and  has  an  orthodox  horror  of 
all  sects.  He  does  not  require  Mr.  Froude's 
delightful  apology  to  win  the  Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress a  place  on  his  shelf,  because,  although  the 
bookman  may  be  far  removed  from  Puritan- 
ism, yet  he  knows  that  Bunyan  had  the  secret 
of  English  style,  and  although  he  may  be  as 
far  from  Romanism,  yet  he  must  needs  have 
his  A'Kempis,  especially  in  Pickering's  edi- 
tion of  1828,  and  when  he  places  the  two 
books  side  by  side  in  the  department  of  reli- 
gion, he  has  a  standing  regret  that  there  is  no 
Pilgrim's  Progress  also  in  Pickering. 

Without  a  complete  Milton  he  could  not  be 
content.  He  would  like  to  have  Masson's  life 
too  in  6  vols,  (with  index),  and  he  is  apt  to 
consider  the  great  Puritan's  prose  still  finer 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        11 

than  his  poetry,  and  will  often  take  down  the 
Areopagitica  that  he  may  breathe  the  air  of 
high  latitudes ;  but  he  has  a  corner  in  his  heart 
for  that  evil  living  and  mendacious  bravo  but 
most  perfect  artist,  Benvenuto  Cellini. 
While  he  counts  Gibbon's,  I  mean  Smith  and 
Milman's  Gibbon's  Rome  in  8  vols.,  blue 
cloth,  the  very  model  of  histories,  yet  he  rev- 
els in  those  books  which  are  the  material  for 
historians,  the  scattered  stones  out  of  which 
he  builds  his  house,  such  as  the  diaries  of  John 
Evelyn  and  our  gossip  Pepys,  and  that  scan- 
dalous book,  Grammonfs  Memoirs,  and  that 
most  credulous  but  interesting  of  Scots  an- 
nalists, Robert  Wodrow. 

According  to  the  bookman,  but  not,  I  am 
sorry  to  say,  in  popular  judgment,  the  most 
toothsome  kind  of  literature  is  the  Essay,  and 
you  will  find  close  to  his  hand  a  dainty  vol- 
ume of  Lamb  open  perhaps  at  that  charming 
paper  on  "  Imperfect  Sympathies,"  and 
though  the  bookman  be  a  Scot  yet  his  palate 
is  pleasantly  tickled  by  Lamb's  description  of 
his  national  character  —  Lamb  and  the  Scots 
did  not  agree  through  an  incompatibility 
of  humour —  and  near  by  he  keeps  his  Haz- 
litt,  whom  he  sometimes  considers  the  most 


12         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

virile  writer  of  the  century:  nor  would  he  be 
quite  happy  unless  he  could  find  in  the  dark 
The  Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table.  He  is 
much  indebted  to  a  London  publisher  for  a 
very  careful  edition  of  the  Spectator,  and  still 
more  to  that  good  bookman,  Mr.  Austin  Dob- 
son,  for  his  admirable  introduction.  As  the 
bookman's  father  was  also  a  bookman,  for  the 
blessing  descendeth  unto  the  third  and  fourth 
generation,  he  was  early  taught  to  love  De 
Quincey,  and  although,  being  a  truthful  man, 
he  cannot  swear  he  has  read  every  page  in  all 
the  fifteen  volumes  —  roxburghe  calf  —  yet 
he  knows  his  way  about  in  that  whimsical, 
discursive,  but  ever  satisfying  writer,  who  will 
write  on  anything,  or  any  person,  always  with 
freshness  and  in  good  English,  from  the  char- 
acter of  Judas  Iscariot  and  "  Murder  as  a 
Fine  Art"  to  the  Lake  Poets  —  there  never 
was  a  Lake  school  —  and  the  Essenes.  He 
has  much  to  say  on  Homer,  and  a  good  deal 
also  on  "  Flogging  in  Schools " ;  he  can 
hardly  let  go  Immanuel  Kant,  but  if  he  does 
it  is  to  give  his  views,  which  are  not  favour- 
able, of  Wilhelm  Meister;  he  is  not  above  con- 
sidering the  art  of  cooking  potatoes  or  the 
question  of  whether  human  beings  once  had 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        13 

tails,  and  in  his  theological  moods  he  will  ex- 
pound St.  John's  Epistles,  or  the  principles 
of  Christianity.  The  bookman,  in  fact,  is  a 
quite  illogical  and  irresponsible  being,  who 
dare  not  claim  that  he  searches  for  accurate 
information  in  his  books  as  for  fine  gold,  and 
he  has  been  known  to  say  that  that  department 
of  books  of  various  kinds  which  come  under 
the  head  of  "  what's  what,"  and  "  why's  why," 
and  "  Where's  where,"  are  not  literature.  He 
does  not  care,  and  that  may  be  foolish, 
whether  he  agrees  with  the  writer,  and  there 
are  times  when  he  does  not  inquire  too  curi- 
ously whether  the  writer  be  respectable,  which 
is  very  wrong,  but  he  is  pleased  if  this  man 
who  died  a  year  ago  or  three  hundred  years 
has  seen  something  with  his  own  eyes  and  can 
tell  him  what  he  saw  in  words  that  still  have 
in  them  the  breath  of  life,  and  he  will  go  with 
cheerful  inconsequence  from  Chaucer,  the  jol- 
liest  of  all  book  companions,  and  Rabelais  — 
although  that  brilliant  satirist  had  pages 
which  the  bookman  avoids,  because  they  make 
his  gorge  rise  —  to  Don  Quixote.  If  he  car- 
ries a  Horace,  Pickering's  little  gem,  in  his 
waistcoat  pocket,  and  sometimes  pictures  that 
genial  Roman  club-man  in  the  Savile,  he  has 


14         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

none  the  less  an  appetite  for  Marcus  Aurelius. 
The  bookman  has  a  series  of  love  affairs  be- 
fore he  is  captured  and  settles  down,  say,  with 
his  favourite  novel,  and  even  after  he  is  a  mid- 
dle-aged married  man  he  must  confess  to  one 
or  two  book  friendships  which  are  perilous  to 
his  inflammable  heart. 

In  the  days  of  calf  love  every  boy  has  first 
tasted  the  sweetness  of  literature  in  two  of 
the  best  novels  ever  written,  as  well  as  two  of 
the  best  pieces  of  good  English.  One  is  Rob- 
inson Crusoe  and  the  other  the  PilgrMs 
Progress.  Both  were  written  by  masters  of 
our  tongue,  and  they  remain  until  this  day 
the  purest  and  most  appetising  introduction 
to  the  book  passion.  They  created  two 
worlds  of  adventure  with  minute  vivid  de- 
tails and  constant  surprises  — •  the  foot  on  the 
sand,  for  instance,  in  Crusoe,  and  the  valley 
of  the  shadow  with  the  hobgoblin  in  Pilgrim's 
Progress  —  and  one  will  have  a  tenderness 
for  these  two  first  loves  even  until  the  end. 
Afterwards  one  went  afield  and  sometimes  got 
into  queer  company,  not  bad  but  simply  a  lit- 
tle common.  There  was  an  endless  series  of 
Red  Indian  stories  in  my  school-days,  wherein 
trappers  could  track  the  enemy  by  a  broken 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        15 

blade  of  grass,  and  the  enemy  escaped  by  com- 
ing down  the  river  under  a  log,  and  the  price 
was  sixpence  each.  We  used  to  pass  the  tuck- 
shop  at  school  for  three  days  on  end  in  order 
that  we  might  possess  Leaping  Deer,  the 
Shawnee  Spy.  We  toadied  shamefully  to  the 
owner  of  Bull's  Eye  Joe,  who,  we  understood, 
had  been  the  sole  protection  of  a  frontier  state. 
Again  and  again  have  I  tried  to  find  one  of 
those  early  friends,  and  in  many  places  have 
I  inquired,  but  my  humble  companions  have 
disappeared  and  left  no  signs,  like  country 
children  one  played  with  in  holiday  times. 

It  appears,  however,  that  I  have  not  been 
the  only  lover  of  the  trapper  stories,  nor  the 
only  one  who  has  missed  his  friends,  for  I  re- 
ceived a  letter  not  long  ago  from  a  bookman 
telling  me  that  he  had  seen  my  complaint 
somewhere,  and  sending  me  the  Frontier 
Angel  on  loan  strictly  that  I  might  have  an 
hour's  sinless  enjoyment.  He  also  said  he 
was  on  the  track  of  Bill  Bidden,  another  fa- 
mous trapper,  and  hoped  to  send  me  word 
that  Bill  was  found,  whose  original  value  was 
sixpence,  but  for  whom  this  bookman  was  now 
prepared  to  pay  gold.  One,  of  course,  does 
not  mean  that  the  Indian  and  trapper  stories 


16         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

had  the  same  claim  to  be  literature  as  the  Pil- 
grim's Progress,  for,  be  it  said  with  reverence, 
there  was  not  much  distinction  in  the  style,  or 
art  in  the  narrative,  but  they  were  romances, 
and  their  subjects  suited  boys,  who  are  bar- 
barians, and  there  are  moments  when  we  are 
barbarians  again,  and  above  all  things  these 
tales  bring  back  the  days  of  long  ago.  It  was 
later  that  one  fell  under  the  power  of  two 
more  mature  and  exacting  charmers,  Mayne 
Reid's  Rifle  Rangers  and  Dumas'  Monte 
Cristo.  The  Rangers  has  vanished  with 
many  another  possession  of  the  past,  but  I 
still  retain  in  a  grateful  memory  the  scene 
where  Rube,  the  Indian  fighter,  who  is  sup- 
posed to  have  perished  in  a  prairie  fire  and  is 
being  mourned  by  the  hero,  emerges  with 
much  humour  from  the  inside  of  a  buffalo 
which  was  lying  dead  upon  the  plain,  and 
rails  at  the  idea  that  he  could  be  wiped  out  so 
easily.  Whether  imagination  has  been  at 
work  or  not  I  do  not  know,  but  that  is  how 
my  memory  has  it  now,  and  to  this  day  1 
count  that  resurrection  a  piece  of  most  fetch- 
ing work. 

Rambling    through    a    bookshop    a    few 
months  ago  I  lighted  on  a  copy  of  Monte 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        17 

Crista  and  bought  it  greedily,  for  there  was 
a  railway  journey  before  me.  It  is  a  critical 
experiment  to  meet  a  love  of  early  days  after 
the  years  have  come  and  gone.  This  stout 
and  very  conventional  woman  —  the  mother 
of  thirteen  children  —  could  she  have  been 
the  black-eyed,  slim  girl  to  whom  you  and  a 
dozen  other  lads  lost  their  hearts?  On  the 
whole,  one  would  rather  have  cherished  the 
former  portrait  and  not  have  seen  the  original 
in  her  last  estate.  It  was  therefore  with  a 
flutter  of  delight  that  one  found  in  this  case 
the  old  charm  as  fresh  as  ever  —  meaning,  of 
course,  the  prison  escape  with  its  amazing  in- 
genuity and  breathless  interest. 

When  one  had  lost  his  bashfulness  and 
could  associate  with  grown-up  books,  then  he 
was  admitted  to  the  company  of  Scott,  and 
Thackeray,  and  Dickens,  who  were  and  are, 
as  far  as  one  can  see,  to  be  the  leaders  of  so- 
ciety. My  fond  recollection  goes  back  to  an 
evening  in  the  early  sixties  when  a  father  read 
to  his  boy  the  first  three  chapters  of  the  Pick- 
wick Papers  from  the  green-coloured  parts, 
and  it  is  a  bitter  regret  that  in  some  clearance 
of  books  that  precious  Pickwick  was  allowed 
to  go,  as  is  supposed,  with  a  lot  of  pamphlets 


18         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

on  Church  and  State,  to  the  great  gain  of  an 
unscrupulous  dealer. 

The  editions  of  Scott  are  now  innumerable, 
each  more  tempting  than  the  other;  but  affec- 
tion turns  back  to  the  old  red  and  white,  in 
forty-eight  volumes,  wherein  one  first  fell  un- 
der the  magician's  spell.  Thackeray,  for 
some  reason  I  cannot  recall,  unless  it  were  a 
prejudice  in  our  home,  I  did  not  read  in 
youth,  but  since  then  I  have  never  escaped 
from  the  fascination  of  Vanity  Fair  and  The 
Newcomes,  and  another  about  which  I  am  to 
speak.  What  giants  there  were  in  the  old 
days,  when  an  average  Englishman,  tried  by 
some  business  worry,  would  say,  "  Never 
mind,  Thackeray's  new  book  will  be  out  to- 
morrow." They  stand,  these  three  sets,  Scott, 
Thackeray,  and  Dickens,  the  very  heart  of 
one's  library  of  fiction.  Wearied  by  sex  nov- 
els, problem  novels,  theological  novels,  and  all 
the  other  novels  with  a  purpose,  one  returns 
to  the  shelf  and  takes  down  a  volume  from 
this  circle,  not  because  one  has  not  read  it, 
but  because  one  has  read  it  thirty  times  and 
wishes  for  sheer  pleasure's  sake  to  read  it 
again.  Just  as  a  tired  man  throws  off  his 
dress  coat  and  slips  on  an  old  study  jacket,  so 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        19 

one  lays  down  the  latest  thoughtful  or  intense 
or  something  worse  pseudo  work  of  fiction, 
and  is  at  ease  with  an  old  gossip  who  is  ever 
wise  and  cheery,  who  never  preaches  and  yet 
gives  one  a  fillip  of  goodness.  Among  the 
masters  one  must  give  a  foremost  place  to 
Balzac,  who  strikes  one  as  the  master  of  the 
art  in  French  literature.  It  is  amazing  that 
in  his  own  day  he  was  not  appreciated  at  his 
full  value,  and  that  it  was  really  left  to  time 
to  discover  and  vindicate  his  position.  He  is 
the  true  founder  of  the  realistic  school  in 
everything  wherein  that  school  deserves  re- 
spect, and  has  been  loyal  to  art.  He  is  also 
certain  to  maintain  his  hold  and  be  an  exam- 
ple to  writers  after  many  modern  realists  have 
been  utterly  and  justly  forgotten. 

Two  books  from  the  shelf  of  fiction  are 
taken  down  and  read  once  a  year  by  a  certain 
bookman  from  beginning  to  end,  and  in  this 
matter  he  is  now  in  the  position  of  a  Moham- 
medan converted  to  Christianity  who  is  ad- 
vised by  the  missionary  to  choose  one  of  his 
two  wives  to  have  and  to  hold  as  a  lawful 
spouse.  When  one  has  given  his  heart  to 
Henry  Esmond  and  the  Heart  of  Midlothian 
he  is  in  a  strait,  and  begins  to  doubt  the  ex- 


20         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

pediency  of  literary  monogamy.  Of  course, 
if  it  go  by  technique  and  finish,  then  Esmond 
has  it,  which  from  first  to  last  in  conception 
and  execution  is  an  altogether  lovely  book; 
and  if  it  go  by  heroes  —  Esmond  and  Butler 
—  then  again  there  is  no  comparison,  for  the 
grandson  of  Cromwell's  trooper  was  a  very 
wearisome,  pedantic,  grey-coloured  Puritan 
in  whom  one  cannot  affect  the  slightest  inter- 
est. How  poorly  he  compares  with  Henry 
Esmond,  who  was  slow  and  diffident,  but  a 
very  brave,  chivalrous,  single-hearted,  modest 
gentleman,  such  as  Thackeray  loved  to  de- 
scribe. Were  it  not  heresy  to  our  Lady  Cas- 
tlewood,  whom  all  must  love  and  serve,  it  also 
comes  to  one  that  Henry  and  Beatrix  would 
have  made  a  complete  pair  if  she  had  put 
some  assurance  in  him  and  he  had  instilled 
some  principle  into  her,  and  Henry  Esmond 
might  have  married  his  young  kinswoman  had 
he  been  more  masterful  and  self-confident. 
Thackeray  takes  us  to  a  larger  and  gayer  scene 
than  Scott's  Edinburgh  of  narrow  streets  and 
gloomy  jails  and  working  people  and  old 
world  theology,  but  yet  it  may  be  after  all 
Scott  is  stronger.  No  bit  of  history,  for  in- 
stance, in  Esmond  takes  such  a  grip  of  the  im- 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        21 

agination  as  the  story  of  the  Porteous  mob. 
After  a  single  reading  one  carries  that  night 
scene  etched  for  ever  in  his  memory.  The 
sullen,  ruthless  crowd  of  dour  Scots,  the  grey 
rugged  houses  lit  up  by  the  glare  of  the 
torches,  the  irresistible  storming  of  the  Tol- 
booth,  the  abject  helplessness  of  Porteous  in 
the  hands  of  his  enemies,  the  austere  and  ju- 
dicial self-restraint  of  the  people,  who  did 
their  work  as  those  who  were  serving  justice, 
their  care  to  provide  a  minister  for  the  crimi- 
nal's last  devotions,  and  their  quiet  dispersal 
after  the  execution  —  all  this  remains  unto 
this  day  the  most  powerful  description  of 
lynch  law  in  fiction.  The  very  strength  of 
old  Edinburgh  and  of  the  Scots-folk  is  in  the 
Heart  of  Midlothian.  The  rivalry,  however, 
between  these  two  books  must  be  decided  by 
the  heroine,  and  it  seems  dangerous  to  the 
lover  of  Scott  to  let  Thackeray's  fine  lady 
stand  side  by  side  with  our  plain  peasant  girl, 
yet  soul  for  soul  which  was  greater,  Rachel  of 
Castlewood  or  Jeanie  Deans?  Lady  Castle- 
wood  must  be  taken  at  the  chief  moment  in 
Esmond,  when  she  says  to  Esmond:  "  To-day, 
Henry,  in  the  anthem  when  they  sang,  *  When 
the  Lord  turned  the  captivity  of  Zion  we  were 


22         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

like  them  that  dream' — I  thought,  yes,  like 
them  that  dream,  and  then  it  went,  *  They  that 
sow  in  tears  shall  reap  in  joy;  and  he  that 
goeth  forth  and  weepeth,  shall  doubtless  come 
again  with  rejoicing,  bringing  his  sheaves 
with  him.'  I  looked  up  from  the  book  and 
saw  you;  I  was  not  surprised  when  I  saw 
you,  I  knew  you  would  come,  my  dear, 
and  I  saw  the  gold  sunshine  round  your  head." 
That  she  said  as  she  laughed  and  sobbed, 
crying  out  wildly,  "  Bringing  your  sheaves 
with  you,  your  sheaves  with  you."  And  this 
again,  as  Esmond  thinks  of  her,  is  surely 
beaten  gold.  "  Gracious  God,  who  was  he, 
weak  and  friendless  creature,  that  such  a  love 
should  be  poured  out  upon  him;  not  in  vain, 
not  in  vain  has  he  lived  that  such  a  treasure 
be  given  him?  What  is  ambition  compared 
to  that  but  selfish  vanity?  To  be  rich,  to  be 
famous:  what  do  these  profit  a  year  hence 
when  other  names  sound  louder  than  yours, 
when  you  lie  hidden  away  under  the  ground 
along  with  the  idle  titles  engraven  on  your 
cofiin?  Only  true  love  lives  after  you,  fol- 
lows your  memory  with  secret  blessing  or  pre- 
cedes you  and  intercedes  for  you.  *  Non  om- 
nis  moriar' — if  dying  I  yet  live  in  a  tender 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        23 

heart  or  two,  nor  am  lost  and  hopeless  living, 
if  a  sainted  departed  soul  still  loves  and  prays 
for  me."  This  seems  to  me  the  second  finest 
passage  in  English  fiction,  and  the  finest  is 
when  Jeanie  Deans  went  to  London  and 
pleaded  with  the  Queen  for  the  life  of  her 
condemned  sister,  for  is  there  any  plea  in  all 
literature  so  eloquent  in  pathos  and  so  true  to 
human  nature  as  this,  when  the  Scottish  peas- 
ant girl  poured  forth  her  heart:  "When  the 
hour  of  trouble  comes  to  the  mind  or  to  the 
body  —  and  seldom  may  it  visit  your  lady- 
ship — >  and  when  the  hour  of  death  that  comes 
to  high  and  low  —  lang  and  late  may  it  be 
yours  —  oh,  my  lady,  then  it  is  na'  what  we 
hae  dune  for  oursels  but  what  we  hae  dune 
for  ithers  that  we  think  on  maist  pleasantly. 
And  the  thought  that  ye  hae  intervened  to 
spare  the  puir  thing's  life  will  be  sweeter  in 
that  hour,  come  when  it  may,  than  if  a  word 
of  your  mouth  could  hang  the  haill  Porteous 
mob  at  the  tail  of  ae  tow."  Jeanie  Deans  is 
the  strongest  woman  in  the  gallery  of  Scott, 
and  an  embodiment  of  all  that  is  sober,  and 
strong,  and  conscientious,  and  passionate  in 
Scotch  nature. 
The  bookman  has  indeed  no  trouble  arrang- 


24         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

ing  his  gossips  in  his  mind,  where  they  hold 
good  fellowship,  but  he  is  careful  to  keep  them 
apart  upon  his  bookshelves,  and  when  he 
comes  home  after  an  absence  and  finds  his 
study  has  been  tidied,  which  in  the  feminine 
mind  means  putting  things  in  order,  and  to 
the  bookman  general  anarchy  (it  was  the  real 
reason  Eve  was  put  out  of  Eden),  when  he 
comes  home,  I  say,  and  finds  that  happy  but 
indecorous  rascal  Boccaccio,  holding  his  very 
sides  for  laughter,  between  Lecky's  History 
of  European  Morals  and  Law's  Serious  Call, 
both  admirable  books,  then  the  bookman  is 
much  exhilarated.  Because  of  the  mischief 
that  is  in  him  he  will  not  relieve  those  two  ex- 
cellent men  of  that  disgraceful  Italian's  com- 
pany for  a  little  space,  but  if  he  finds  that  the 
domestic  sprite  has  thrust  a  Puritan  between 
two  Anglican  theologians  he  effects  a  separa- 
tion without  delay,  for  a  religious  contro- 
versy with  its  din  and  clatter  is  more  than  he 
can  bear. 

The  bookman  is  indeed  perpetually  en- 
gaged in  his  form  of  spring  cleaning,  which 
is  rearranging  his  books,  and  is  always  hoping 
to  square  the  circle,  in  both  collecting  the 
books  of  one  department  together,  and  also 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        25 

having  his  books  in  equal  sizes.  After  a  brief 
glance  at  a  folio  and  an  octavo  side  by  side  he 
gives  up  that  attempt,  but  although  he  may 
have  to  be  content  to  see  his  large  Augustine, 
Benedictine  edition,  in  the  same  row  with 
Bayle's  Dictionary,  he  does  not  like  it  and 
comforts  himself  by  thrusting  in  between,  as 
a  kind  of  mediator,  Spotswood's  History  of 
the  Church  of  Scotland  with  Burnett's  Mem- 
oirs of  the  Dukes  of  Hamilton,  that  edition 
which  has  the  rare  portrait  of  Charles  I.  by 
Faithorne.  He  will  be  all  his  life  rearrang- 
ing, and  so  comes  to  understand  how  it  is  that 
Rvomen  spend  forenoons  of  delight  in  box 
rooms  or  store  closets,  and  are  happiest  when 
everything  is  turned  upside  down.  It  is  a 
slow  business,  rearrangement,  for  one  cannot 
flit  a  book  bound  after  the  taste  of  Grolier, 
with  graceful  interlacement  and  wealth  of 
small  ornaments,  without  going  to  the  window 
and  lingering  for  a  moment  over  the  glorious 
art,  and  one  cannot  handle  a  Compleat 
Angler  without  tasting  again  some  favourite 
passage.  It  is  days  before  five  shelves  are  re- 
constructed, days  of  unmixed  delight,  a  per- 
petual whirl  of  gaiety,  as  if  one  had  been  at  a 
conversazione,  where  all  kinds  of  famous  peo- 


26         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

pie  whom  you  had  known  afar  had  been  gath- 
ered together  and  you  had  spoken  to  each  as 
if  he  had  been  the  friend  of  your  boyhood. 
It  is  in  fact  a  time  of  reminiscences,  when  the 
two  of  you,  the  other  being  Sir  Thomas 
Browne,  or  Goldsmith,  or  Scott,  or  Thack- 
eray, go  over  passages  together  which  contain 
the  sweetest  recollections  of  the  past.  When 
the  bookman  reads  the  various  suggestions  for 
a  holiday  which  are  encouraged  in  the  daily 
newspapers  for  commercial  purposes  about 
the  month  of  July,  he  is  vastly  amused  by  their 
futility,  and  often  thinks  of  pointing  out  the 
only  holiday  which  is  perfectly  satisfying.  It 
is  to  have  a  week  without  letters  and  without 
visitors,  with  no  work  to  do,  and  no  hours, 
either  for  rising  up  or  lying  down,  and  to 
spend  the  week  in  a  library,  his  own,  of 
course,  by  preference,  opening  out  by  a  level 
window  into  an  old-fashioned  garden  where 
the  roses  are  in  full  bloom,  and  to  wander  as 
he  pleases  from  flower  to  flower  where  the 
spirit  of  the  books  and  the  fragrance  of  the 
roses  mingle  in  one  delight. 

Times  there  are  when  he  would  like  to  hold 
a  meeting  of  bookmen,  each  of  whom  should 
be  a  mighty  hunter,  and  he  would  dare  to  in- 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        27 

vite  Cosmo  Medici,  who  was  as  keen  about 
books  as  he  was  about  commerce,  and  accord- 
ing to  Gibbon  used  to  import  Indian  spices 
and  Greek  books  by  the  same  vessel,  and  that 
admirable  Bishop  of  Durham  who  was  as 
joyful  on  reaching  Paris  as  the  Jewish  pilgrim 
was  when  he  went  to  Sion,  because  of  the 
books  that  were  there.  "  O  Blessed  God  of 
Gods,  what  a  rush  of  the  glow  of  Pleasure 
rejoiced  our  hearts,  as  often  as  we  visited 
Paris,  the  Paradise  of  the  World!  There  we 
long  to  remain,  where  on  account  of  the  great- 
ness of  our  love  the  days  ever  appear  to  us 
to  be  few.  There  are  delightful  libraries  in 
cells  redolent  with  aromatics,  there  flourishing 
greenhouses  of  all  sorts  of  volumes,  there  aca- 
demic meads,  trembling  with  the  earthquake 
of  Athenian  Peripatetics  pacing  up  and  down, 
there  the  promontory  of  Parnassus  and  the 
Porticoes  of  the  Stoics."  The  Duke  of  Rox- 
burghe  and  Earl  Spencer,  two  gallant  sports- 
men whose  spoils  have  enriched  the  land; 
Monkbarns  also,  though  we  will  not  let  him 
bring  any  antiquities  with  him,  jagged  or 
otherwise;  and  Charles  Lamb,  whom  we  shall 
coax  into  telling  over  again  how  he  started 
out  at  ten  o'clock  on   Saturday  night  and 


28         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

roused  up  old  Barker  in  Covent  Garden,  and 
came  home  in  triumph  with  "  that  folio  Beau- 
mont and  Fletcher,"  going  forth  almost  in 
tears  lest  the  book  should  be  gone,  and  coming 
home  rejoicing,  carrying  his  sheaf  with  him. 
Besides,  whether  Bodley  and  Dibdin  like  it 
or  not,  we  must  have  a  Royalty,  for  there  were 
Queens  who  collected,  and  also  on  occasions 
stole  books,  and  though  she  be  not  the  great- 
est of  the  Queenly  bookwomen  and  did  not 
steal,  we  shall  invite  Mary  Queen  of  Scots, 
while  she  is  living  in  Holyrood,  and  has  her 
library  beside  her.  Mary  had  a  fine  collec- 
tion of  books  well  chosen  and  beautifully 
bound,  and  as  I  look  now  at  the  catalogue  it 
seems  to  me  a  library  more  learned  than  is 
likely  to  be  found  even  in  the  study  of  an  ad- 
vanced young  woman  of  to-day.  A  Book  of 
Devotion  which  was  said  to  have  belonged  to 
her  and  afterwards  to  a  Pope,  gloriously 
bound,  I  was  once  allowed  to  look  upon,  but 
did  not  buy,  because  the  price  was  marked  in 
plain  figures  at  a  thousand  guineas.  It  would 
be  something  to  sit  in  a  corner  and  hear  Monk- 
barns  and  Charles  Lamb  comparing  notes, 
and  to  watch  for  the  moment  when  Lamb 
would  withdraw  all  he  had  said  against  the 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        29 

Scots  people,  or  Earl  Spencer  describing  with 
delight  to  the  Duke  of  Roxburghe  the  battle 
of  the  Sale.  But  I  will  guarantee  that  the 
whole  company  of  bookworms  would  end  in 
paying  tribute  to  that  intelligent  and  very 
fascinating  young  woman  from  Holyrood, 
who  still  turns  men's  heads  across  the  stretch 
of  centuries.  For  even  a  bookman  has  got  a 
heart. 

Like  most  diseases  the  mania  for  books  is 
hereditary,  and  if  the  father  is  touched  with 
it  the  son  can  hardly  escape,  and  it  is  not  even 
necessary  that  the  son  should  have  known  his 
father.  For  Sainte-Beuve's  father  died  when 
he  was  an  infant  and  his  mother  had  no  book 
tastes,  but  his  father  left  him  his  books  with 
many  comments  on  the  margins,  and  the  book 
microbe  was  conveyed  by  the  pages.  "  I  was 
born,"  said  the  great  critic  in  the  Consola- 
tions, "  I  was  born  in  a  time  of  mourning;  my 
cradle  rested  on  a  coffin  .  .  .  my  father 
left  me  his  soul,  mind,  and  taste  written  on 
every  margin  of  his  books."  When  a  boy 
grows  up  beside  his  father  and  his  father  is  in 
the  last  stages  of  the  book  disease,  there  is 
hardly  any  power  which  can  save  that  son, 
unless  the  mother  be  robustly  illiterate,  in 


80         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

which  case  the  crossing  of  the  blood  may  make 
him  impervious.  For  a  father  of  this  kind 
will  unconsciously  inoculate  his  boy,  allowing 
him  to  play  beside  him  in  the  bookroom, 
where  the  air  is  charged  with  germs  (against 
which  there  is  no  disinfectant,  I  believe,  ex- 
cept commercial  conversation),  and  when  the 
child  is  weary  of  his  toys  will  give  him  an  old 
book  of  travels,  with  quaint  pictures  which 
never  depart  from  the  memory.  By  and  by, 
so  thoughtless  is  this  invalid  father,  who  has 
suffered  enough,  surely,  himself  from  this  dis- 
ease, that  he  will  allow  his  boy  to  open  parcels 
of  books,  reeking  with  infection,  and  explain 
to  him  the  rarity  of  a  certain  first  edition,  or 
show  him  the  thickness  of  the  paper  and  the 
glory  of  the  black-letter  in  an  ancient  book. 
Afterwards,  when  the  boy  himself  has  taken 
ill  and  begun  on  his  own  account  to  prowl 
through  the  smaller  bookstalls,  his  father  will 
listen  greedily  to  the  stories  he  has  to  tell  in 
the  evening,  and  will  chuckle  aloud  when  one 
day  the  poor  victim  of  this  deadly  illness 
comes  home  with  a  newspaper  of  the  time  of 
Charles  II.,  which  he  has  bought  for  three- 
pence. It  is  only  a  question  of  time  when  that 
lad,  being  now  on  an  allowance  of  his  own, 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        31 

will  be  going  about  in  a  suit  of  disgracefully 
shabby  tweeds,  that  he  may  purchase  a  The- 
ophrastus  of  fine  print  and  binding  upon 
which  he  has  long  had  his  eye,  and  will  be 
taking  milk  and  bread  for  his  lunch  in  the 
city,  because  he  has  a  foolish  ambition  to  ac- 
quire by  a  year's  saving  the  Kelmscott  edition 
of  the  Golden  Legend.  A  change  of  air 
might  cure  him,  as  for  instance  twenty  years' 
residence  on  an  American  ranch,  but  even  then 
on  his  return  the  disease  might  break  out 
again:  indeed  the  chances  are  strong  that  he 
is  really  incurable.  Last  week  I  saw  such  a 
case  —  the  bookman  of  the  second  generation 
in  a  certain  shop  where  such  unfortunates  col- 
lect. For  an  hour  he  had  been  there  browsing 
along  the  shelves,  his  hat  tilted  back  upon  his 
head  that  he  might  hold  the  books  the  nearer 
to  his  eyes,  and  an  umbrella  under  his  left 
arm,  projecting  awkwardly,  which  he  had  not 
laid  down,  because  he  did  not  intend  to  stay 
more  than  two  minutes,  and  knew  indeed,  as 
the  father  of  a  family,  that  he  ought  not  to  be 
there  at  all.  He  often  drops  in,  for  this  is 
not  one  of  those  stores  where  a  tradesman  hur- 
ries forward  to  ask  what  you  want  and  offers 
you  the  last  novel  which  has  captivated  the 


32         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

juicy  iBritish  palate;  the  bookman  regards 
such  a  place  with  the  same  feeling  that  a  phy- 
sician has  to  a  patent  drug  store.  The  dealer 
in  this  place  so  loved  his  books  that  he  almost 
preferred  a  customer  who  knew  them  above 
one  who  bought  them,  and  honestly  felt  a  pang 
when  a  choice  book  was  sold.  Never  can  I 
forget  what  the  great  Quaritch  said  to  me 
when  he  was  showing  me  the  inner  shrine  of 
his  treasure-house,  and  I  felt  it  honest  to  ex- 
plain that  I  could  only  look,  lest  he  should 
think  me  an  impostor.  "  I  would  sooner 
show  such  books  to  a  man  that  loved  them 
though  he  couldn't  buy  them,  than  a  man  who 
gave  me  my  price  and  didn't  know  what  he 
had  got."  With  this  slight  anecdote  I  would 
in  passing  pay  the  tribute  of  bookmen  to  the 
chief  hunter  of  big  game  in  our  day. 

When  the  bookman  is  a  family  man,  and  I 
have  sometimes  doubts  whether  he  ought  not 
to  be  a  celibate  like  missionaries  of  religion 
and  other  persons  called  to  special  devotion, 
he  has  of  course  to  battle  against  his  tempta- 
tion, and  his  struggles  are  very  pathetic.  The 
parallel  between  dipsomania  and  bibliomania 
is  very  close  and  suggestive,  and  I  have  often 
thought  that  more  should  be  made  of  it.     It 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        33 

is  the  wife  who  in  both  cases  is  usually  the  suf- 
ferer and  good  angel,  and  under  her  happy 
influence  the  bookman  will  sometimes  take 
the  pledge,  and  for  him,  it  is  needless  to  say, 
there  is  only  one  cure.  He  cannot  be  a  mod- 
erate drinker,  for  there  is  no  possibility  of 
moderation,  and  if  he  is  to  be  saved  he  must 
become  a  total  abstainer.  He  must  sign  the 
pledge,  and  the  pledge  must  be  made  of  a 
solemn  character  with  witnesses,  say  his  poor 
afflicted  wife  and  some  intelligent  self-made 
Philistine.  Perhaps  it  might  run  like  this: 
"  I,  A.  B.,  do  hereby  promise  that  I  will  never 
buy  a  classical  book  in  any  tongue,  or  any 
book  in  a  rare  edition ;  that  I  will  never  spend 
money  on  books  in  tree-calf  or  tooled  mo- 
rocco ;  that  I  shall  never  enter  a  real  old  book- 
shop, but  should  it  be  necessary  shall  pur- 
chase my  books  at  a  dry  goods  store,  and  there 
shall  never  buy  anything  but  the  cheapest  re- 
ligious literature,  or  occasionally  a  popular 
story  for  my  wife,  and  to  this  promise  I  sol- 
emnly set  my  hand."  With  the  ruin  of  his 
family  before  his  eyes,  or  at  least,  let  us  say, 
the  disgraceful  condition  of  the  dining-room 
carpet,  he  intends  to  keep  his  word,  and  for  a 
whole  fortnight  will  not  allow  himself  to  en- 


84         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

ter  the  street  of  his  favourite  bookshop. 
Next  week,  however,  business,  so  he  says  at 
least,  takes  him  down  the  street,  but  he  re- 
members the  danger,  and  makes  a  brave  effort 
to  pass  a  public-house.  The  mischief  of  the 
thing,  however,  is  that  there  is  another  public- 
house  in  the  street  and  passing  it  whets  the  la- 
tent appetite,  and  when  he  is  making  a  brave 
dash  past  his  own,  some  poor  inebriate,  com- 
ing out  reluctantly,  holds  the  door  open,  and 
the  smell  is  too  much  for  his  new-born  virtue. 
He  will  go  in  just  for  a  moment  to  pass  the 
time  of  day  with  his  friend  the  publican  and 
see  his  last  brand  of  books,  but  not  to  buy  — < 
I  mean  to  drink — ^and  then  he  comes  across 
a  little  volume,  the  smallest  and  slimmest  of 
volumes,  a  mere  trifle  of  a  thing,  and  not  dear, 
but  a  thing  which  does  not  often  turn  up,  and 
which  would  just  round  off  his  collection  at 
a  particular  point.  It  is  only  a  mere  taste, 
not  downright  drinking;  but  ah  me,  it  sets  him 
on  fire  again,  and  I  who  had  seen  him  go  in 
and  then  by  a  providence  have  met  his  wife 
coming  out  from  buying  that  carpet,  told  her 
where  her  husband  was,  and  saw  her  go  to 
fetch  him.  Among  the  touching  incidents  of 
life,  none  comes  nearer  me  than  to  see  the 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        35 

bookman's  wife  pleading  with  him  to  remem- 
ber his  (once)  prosperous  home  and  his  (al- 
most) starving  children.  And  indeed  if  there 
be  any  other  as  entirely  affecting  in  this  prov- 
ince, it  is  the  triumphant  cunning  with  which 
the  bookman  will  smuggle  a  suspicious  brown 
paper  parcel  into  his  study  at  an  hour  when 
his  wife  is  out,  or  the  effrontery  with  which 
he  will  declare,  when  caught,  that  the  books 
have  been  sent  unbeknown  to  him,  and  he  sup- 
poses merely  for  his  examination.  For,  like 
drink,  this  fearsome  disease  eats  into  the  very 
fibre  of  character,  so  that  its  victim  will  prac- 
tise tricks  to  obtain  books  in  advance  of  a  rival 
collector,  and  will  tell  the  most  mendacious 
stories  about  what  he  paid  for  them. 

Should  he  desire  a  book,  and  it  be  not  a 
king's  ransom,  there  is  no  sacrifice  he  will  not 
make  to  obtain  it.  His  modest  glass  of  Bur- 
gundy he  will  cheerfully  give  up,  and  if  he 
ever  travelled  by  any  higher  class,  which  is 
not  likely,  he  will  now  go  third,  and  his  top- 
coat he  will  make  last  another  year,  and  I  do 
not  say  he  will  not  smoke,  but  a  cigar  will  now 
leave  him  unmoved.  Yes,  and  if  he  gets  a 
chance  to  do  an  extra  piece  of  writing,  be- 
tween 12  and  2  A.  M.,  he  will  clutch  at  the  op- 


86         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

portunity,  and  all  that  he  saves,  he  will  calcu- 
late shilling  by  shilling,  and  the  book  he  pur- 
chases with  the  complete  price  —  that  is  the 
price  to  which  he  has  brought  down  the  seller 
after  two  days'  negotiations  —  anxious  yet  joy- 
ful days  —  will  be  all  the  dearer  to  him  for 
his  self-denial.  He  has  also  anodynes  for  his 
conscience  when  he  seems  to  be  wronging  his 
afflicted  family,  for  is  he  not  gathering  the 
best  of  legacies  for  his  sons,  something  which 
will  make  their  houses  rich  for  ever,  or  if 
things  come  to  the  worst  cannot  his  collecion 
be  sold  and  all  he  has  expended  be  restored 
with  usury,  which  in  passing  I  may  say  is  a 
vain  dream.  But  at  any  rate,  if  other  men 
spend  money  on  dinners  and  on  sport,  and 
carved  furniture  and  gay  clothing,  may  he  not 
also  have  one  luxury  in  life?  His  conscience, 
however,  does  give  painful  twinges,  and  he 
will  leave  the  Pines  Horace  which  he  has 
been  handling  delicately  for  three  weeks,  in 
hopeless  admiration  of  its  marvellous  typog- 
raphy, and  be  outside  the  door  before  a  happy 
thought  strikes  him,  and  he  returns  to  buy  it, 
after  thirty  minutes*  bargaining,  with  perfect 
confidence  and  a  sense  of  personal  generosity. 
What  gave  him  this  relief  and  now  suffuses 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        37 

his  very  soul  with  charity?  It  was  a  date 
which  for  the  moment  he  had  forgotten  and 
which  has  occurred  most  fortunately.  To- 
morrow will  be  the  birthday  of  a  man  whom 
he  has  known  all  his  days  and  more  intimately 
than  any  other  person,  and  although  he  has 
not  so  high  an  idea  of  the  man  as  the  world  is 
good  enough  to  hold,  and  although  he  has 
often  quarrelled  with  him  and  called  him 
shocking  names  —  which  tomcats  would  be 
ashamed  of  —  yet  he  has  at  the  bottom  a 
sneaking  fondness  for  the  fellow,  and  some- 
times hopes  he  is  not  quite  so  bad  after  all. 
One  thing  is  certain,  the  rascal  loves  a  good 
book  and  likes  to  have  it  when  he  can,  and  per- 
haps it  will  make  him  a  better  man  to  show 
that  he  has  been  remembered  and  that  one  per- 
son at  least  believes  in  him,  and  so  the  book- 
man orders  that  delightful  treasure  to  be  sent 
to  his  own  address  in  order  that  next  day  he 
may  present  it — -as  a  birthday  present  —  to 
himself. 

Concerning  tastes  in  pleasure  there  can  be 
no  final  judgment,  but  for  the  bookman  it  may 
be  said,  beyond  any  other  sportsman,  he  has 
the  most  constant  satisfaction,  for  to  him  there 
is  no  close  season,  except  the  spring  cleaning 


38         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

which  he  furiously  resents,  and  only  allows 
one  in  five  years,  and  his  autumn  holiday,  but 
then  he  takes  some  six  handy  volumes  with 
him.  For  him  there  are  no  hindrances  of 
weather,  for  if  the  day  be  sunshine  he  taketh 
his  pleasure  in  a  garden,  and  if  the  day  be 
sleet  of  March  the  fireside  is  the  dearer,  and 
there  is  a  certain  volume  —  Payne's  binding, 
red  morocco,  which  was  a  favourite  colour  of 
Payne's  —  and  the  bookman  reads  Don 
Quixote  with  the  more  relish  because  the 
snow-drift  is  beating  on  the  window.  During 
the  hours  of  the  day  when  he  is  visiting  pa- 
tients, who  tell  their  symptoms  at  intolerable 
length,  or  dictating  letters  about  corn,  or  com- 
posing sermons,  which  will  not  always  run, 
the  bookman  is  thinking  of  the  quiet  hour 
which  will  lengthen  into  one  hundred  and 
eighty  minutes,  when  he  shall  have  his  re- 
ward, the  kindliest  for  which  a  man  can  work 
or  hope  to  get.  He  will  spend  the  time  in  the 
good  company  of  people  who  will  not  quarrel 
with  him,  nor  will  he  quarrel  with  them. 
Some  of  them  of  high  estate  and  some  ex- 
tremely low;  some  of  them  learned  persons 
and  some  of  them  simple,  country  men.  For 
while  the  bookman  counteth  it  his  chief  hon- 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        39 

our  and  singular  privilege  to  hold  converse 
with  Virgil  and  Dante,  with  Shakespeare  and 
Bacon,  and  such-like  nobility,  yet  is  he  very 
happy  with  Bailie  Nicol  Jarvie  and  Dandie 
Dinmont,  with  Mr.  Micawber  and  Mrs. 
Gamp;  he  is  proud  when  Diana  Vernon 
comes  to  his  room,  and  he  has  a  chair  for 
Colonel  Newcome ;  he  likes  to  hear  Coleridge 
preach,  who,  as  Lamb  said,  "  never  did  any- 
thing else,"  and  is  much  flattered  when 
Browning  tries  to  explain  what  he  meant  in 
Paracelsus.  It  repays  one  for  much  worry 
when  William  Blake  not  only  reads  his  Songs 
of  Innocence  but  also  shows  his  own  illustra- 
tion, and  he  turns  to  his  life  of  Michael 
Angelo  with  the  better  understanding  after  he 
has  read  what  Michael  Angelo  wrote  to  Vit- 
toria  Colonna.  He  that  hath  such  friends, 
grave  or  gay,  needeth  not  to  care  whether  he 
be  rich  or  poor,  whether  he  know  great  folk 
or  they  pass  him  by,  for  he  is  independent  of 
society  and  all  its  whims,  and  almost  inde- 
pendent of  circumstances.  His  friends  of 
this  circle  will  never  play  him  false  nor  ever 
take  the  pet.  If  he  does  not  wish  their  com- 
pany they  are  silent,  and  then  when  he  turns 
to  them  again  there  is  no  difference  in  the  wel- 


40         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

come,  for  they  maintain  an  equal  mind  and 
are  ever  in  good  humour.  As  he  comes  in 
tired  and  possibly  upset  by  smaller  people 
they  receive  him  in  a  kindly  fashion,  and  in 
the  firelight  their  familiar  faces  make  his 
•heart  glad.  Once  I  stood  in  Emerson's  room, 
and  I  saw  the  last  words  that  he  wrote,  the 
pad  on  which  he  wrote  them,  and  the  pen  with 
which  they  were  written,  and  the  words  are 
these :  "  The  Book  is  a  sure  friend,  always 
ready  at  your  first  leisure,  opens  to  the  very 
page  you  desire,  and  shuts  at  your  first  fa- 
tigue." 

As  the  bookman  grows  old  and  many  of  his 
pleasures  cease,  he  thanks  God  for  one  which 
grows  the  richer  for  the  years  and  never  fades. 
He  pities  those  who  have  not  this  retreat  from 
the  weariness  of  life,  nor  this  quiet  place  in 
which  to  sit  when  the  sun  is  setting.  By  the 
mellow  wisdom  of  his  books  and  the  immortal 
hope  of  the  greater  writers  he  is  kept  from 
peevishness  and  discontent,  from  bigotry  and 
despair.  Certain  books  grow  dearer  to  him 
with  the  years,  so  that  their  pages  are  worn 
brown  and  thin,  and  he  hopes  with  a  Birming- 
ham book-lover.  Dr.  Showell  Rogers,  whose 
dream  has  been  fulfilled,  that  Heaven,  having 


BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN        41 

a  place  for  each  true  man,  may  be  "  a  book- 
man's paradise,  where  early  black-lettered 
tomes,  rare  and  stately,  first  folios  of  Shake- 
speare, tall  copies  of  the  right  editions  of  the 
Elzevirs,  and  vellumed  volumes  galore,  un- 
cropped,  uncut,  and  unfoxed  in  all  their  ver- 
dant pureness,  fresh  as  v^^hen  they  left  the 
presses  of  the  Aldi,  are  to  be  had  for  the  ask- 
ing." Between  this  man  at  least  and  his  books 
there  will  be  no  separation  this  side  the  grave, 
but  his  gratitude  to  them  and  his  devotion 
will  ever  grow  and  their  ministries  to  him  be 
ever  dearer,  especially  that  Book  of  books 
which  has  been  the  surest  guide  of  the  human 
soul.  "  While  I  live,"  says  one  who  both 
wrote  and  loved  books  and  was  one  of  our 
finest  critics,  "  while  I  live  and  think,  nothing 
can  deprive  me  of  my  value  for  such  treasures. 
I  can  help  the  appreciation  of  them  while  I 
last  and  love  them  till  I  die,  and  perhaps  if 
fortune  turns  her  face  once  more  in  kindness 
upon  me  before  I  go,  I  may  chance,  some 
quiet  day,  to  lay  my  overheating  temples  on 
a  book,  and  so  have  the  death  I  most  envy." 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS 

AS  a  writer  on  any  subject  is  apt  to  have 
a  partial  mind,  I  desire  to  clear  myself 
at  once  from  all  prejudice  by  offering 
to  my  judicial  readers  the  assurance  of  my 
profound  conviction  that  a  sense  of  humour 
is  a  hindrance  to  practical  success  in  life,  but 
of  course  they  will  notice  the  qualified  form 
of  my  statement.  To  have  an  eye  for  the  re- 
curring comedy  of  things,  so  that  no  absurdity 
of  speech  or  incident  escapes,  is  a  joy  to  the 
individual,  sustaining  him  wonderfully  amid 
the  labours  and  stupidities  uf  life,  and  very 
likely  it  is  also  a  joy  to  his  friends,  who  have 
learned  from  him  to  use  the  wholesome  medi- 
cine of  laughter.  But  if  you  come  to  one's 
daily  calling  and  make  the  two  exceptions  of 
literature  and  caricature  in  Art,  who  has  not 
suffered  through  the  affliction  of  humour?  If 
the  humorist,  and  I  am  not  now  speaking  of 
a  merely  jocose  person,  but  of  one  who  has  a 
real  palate  for  comedy,  happens  to  be  a  clergy- 
man, then  he  runs  the  greatest  risk  in  his  as- 

45 


46         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

sociation  with  good  people,  for  with  a  few  ex- 
ceptions, which  are  only  tolerated  and  apolo- 
gised for,  this  class  will  say  things  in  all  seri- 
ousness which  such  a  man  will  not  be  able  to 
resist,  and  one  brief  break-down  may  ruin  his 
character  for  life.  He  will  be  afraid  to  at- 
tend a  religious  meeting,  lest  some  worthy 
speaker,  having  raised  his  audience  to  the 
highest  pitch  of  pious  expectation,  should  top- 
ple over  into  an  anti-climax;  and  funerals 
will  be  to  him  a  double  trial,  because  comedy 
lies  so  near  to  tragedy.  It  gets  upon  this  poor 
man's  nerves  when  a  neighbour  whom  he  has 
seen  coming  along  the  street,  round-faced  and 
chirpy,  enters  the  room  with  an  expression  of 
dolorous  woe,  shakes  hands  with  the  under- 
taker instead  of  the  chief  mourner,  and  is 
heard  to  remark  with  much  unction  and  a  sigh 
which  stirs  the  atmosphere,  "  There  to-day 
and  here  to-morrow,  much  missed."  One  un- 
happy clergyman  still  blushes  with  shame  as 
he  recalls  an  incident  of  his  early  days  when, 
in  a  northern  city,  he  was  sent  to  take  a  funeral 
service  in  the  kitchen  of  a  workingman's 
house.  They  sat  round  him,  eight  Scots  ar- 
tisans, each  in  his  Sunday  blacks,  with  his  pipe 
projecting  from  his  waistcoat  pocket,  and  his 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       47 

hat  below  his  chair,  looking  with  awful,  im- 
movable countenance  into  the  eternities.  It 
seemed  irreverent  to  speak  to  any  one  of  the 
graven  images,  but  the  poor  minister  required 
to  know  something  about  the  man  who  had 
died,  and  so  he  ventured  to  ask  the  figure  next 
him  in  a  whisper  what  the  deceased  had  been? 
Whereupon  the  figure  answered  with  a  loud, 
clear  voice,  "  I  dinna  ken  myself,  for  I  jest 
came  here  wi'  a  friend,"  and  then,  addressing 
a  still  more  awful  figure  opposite,  and  in  a 
still  more  aggressive  tone,  "  Jeems,  what  was 
the  corpse  to  a  trade? "  After  which  the 
trembling  minister  wished  he  had  left  the  mat- 
ter alone. 

Will  a  medical  man  be  acceptable  to  that 
large  class  of  patients  who  love  to  speak  of 
their  ailments  and  have  nothing  wrong  with 
them,  if  they  discover  that  he  is  laughing  at 
them,  and  especially  if  he  allows  himself  the 
relief  of  sarcasm?  Is  it  not  better  for  his  in- 
come, if  not  for  his  science,  that  he  should  be 
able  to  listen  with  a  murmur  of  sympathy  to 
old  ladies  of  both  sexes  describing  their  symp- 
toms, and  prescribe  the  most  harmless  of  mix- 
tures with  an  owl-like  countenance,  beseeching 
them  not  to  lose  heart,  even  in  such  desperate 


48         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

circumstances,  and  departing  with  the  assur- 
ance that  he  is  at  their  service  night  and  day, 
and  must  be  sent  for  instantly  if  the  coloured 
water  gives  no  relief?  They  say  two  Roman 
Augurs  could  not  look  at  one  another  without 
laughing,  but  how  much  more  ought  to  be 
pitied  the  consultant  and  the  general  practi- 
tioner who  meet  over  the  case  of  a  hypochon- 
driac? 

I  challenge  any  one  to  mention  a  politician 
of  our  time  who,  on  the  whole,  has  not  lost, 
rather  than  gained,  through  humour;  and  I 
fancy  no  man  should  be  more  afraid  of  this 
tricky  gift  than  a  leader  of  the  democracy. 
Had  Mr.  Gladstone  possessed  the  faintest 
sense  of  the  ridiculous  amid  the  multitude  of 
his  rich  and  brilliant  talents,  he  had  not  been 
able  to  address  a  crowd  from  the  window  of 
his  railway  carriage,  and  receive  a  gift  of  a 
plaid,  or  a  walking-stick,  or,  if  my  memory 
does  not  fail  me,  a  case  of  marmalade,  until 
his  outraged  fellow-passengers,  anxious  to 
make  connections,  insisted  the  train  should  go 
on,  and  it  departed  to  the  accompaniment  of 
the  statesman's  eloquent  peroration.  But  it 
was  just  because  Mr.  Gladstone  could  do  such 
things,  and  was  always  in  the  most  deadly 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       49 

earnest,  that  the  people  trusted  him  and  hung 
upon  his  words.  Nothing  was  so  dangerous 
a  snare  to  Lord  Beaconsfield  as  his  abounding 
and  delightful  humour,  for  it  lodged  in  the 
minds  of  the  English  people  a  suspicion 
which  never  departed,  that  that  brilliant  man, 
who  had  been  so  farseeing  in  his  ideas  and  an- 
ticipations of  the  trend  of  events,  was  little 
else  than  a  charlatan  and  a  scorner;  and  I 
fancy  that  Lord  Salisbury's  most  devoted  fol- 
lowers would  have  been  glad  if  some  of  his 
mordant  jests  had  never  passed  beyond  his 
study.  Is  there  not  another  most  accom- 
plished and  attractive  personality  in  politics 
who  has  forfeited  the  chance  of  supreme  au- 
thority, partly  no  doubt  by  a  pronounced  in- 
dividualism, but  partly  also  by  a  graceful 
lightness  of  touch  and  allusion  which  are  not 
judged  consistent  with  that  fierce  sincerity 
which  has  been  the  strength  of  his  party? 
Toleration  is  never  without  a  flavour  of  hu- 
mour, but  humour  is  an  absolute  disability  to 
fanaticism.  With  this  genial  sense  of  human- 
ity no  man  can  be  a  fanatic,  and  in  a  recent 
book  on  French  crime  it  is  frequently  men- 
tioned that  the  principal  miscreants  were  in- 
tense persons  with  no  humour,  so  that  in  this 


50         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

branch  of  life,  quite  as  much  as  in  politics,  the 
humorous  person  is  severely  handicapped. 
One  feels  as  if  his  money  and  his  life  were  safe 
in  the  hands  of  a  person  who  can  enjoy  an  hon- 
est jest,  but  this  may  only  prove  that  the  per- 
son is  lacking  in  that  determination  and  enter- 
prise which  are  conditions  of  practical  suc- 
cess in  a  strenuous  modern  community. 

So  far  as  a  layman  in  such  affairs  can  judge, 
humour  is  alien  to  the  business  mind,  and 
would  forfeit  any  character  for  stability. 
The  looker-on,  who,  of  course,  may  be  a  very 
foolish  person,  is  amazed  at  the  substantial 
success  of  dull  men  and  the  respect  in  which 
they  are  held,  and  he  is  equally  amazed  at  the 
suspicion  with  which  bright  men,  whose  con- 
versation sparkles  and  enlivens,  are  regarded 
and  the  slight  esteem  in  which  they  are  held. 
The  former  may  be  wooden  to  the  last  point  of 
exasperation,  but  his  neighbours  pronounce 
him  to  be  solid,  and  thrust  him  into  director^ 
ships,  chairmanships,  the  magistracy  and  Par- 
liament, and  after  a  long  course  of  solidity 
and  success,  with  increasing  woodenness,  he 
will  likely  reach  the  House  of  Lords.  But 
the  other  man,  with  whom  you  spent  so  pleas- 
ant an  evening,  and  who  is  as  much  at  home 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       51 

among  books  as  "  a  stable-boy  among  horses," 
is  apt  to  be  judged  light  metal  —  a  person 
who  may  know  his  Shakespeare,  but  could  not 
be  trusted  with  things  of  value  like  money. 
There  are  times  when  one  loses  heart  and  al- 
most concludes  that  the  condition  of  tangible 
success  in  English  life  is  to  be  well-built,  giv- 
ing a  pledge  to  fortune  in  a  moderate  stout- 
ness, to  have  a  solemn  expression  of  face,  sug- 
gesting the  possession  of  more  wisdom  than  is 
likely  to  have  been  given  to  any  single  person, 
to  be  able  to  hold  one's  tongue  till  some  in- 
cautious talker  has  afforded  an  idea,  and  to 
have  the  gift  of  oracular  commonplace.  If 
to  such  rare  talents  can  be  added  an  im- 
pressive clearance  of  the  throat,  there  are  few 
positions  in  Church  or  State,  short  of  the  high- 
est, to  which  their  owner  may  not  climb.  My 
advice,  therefore,  to  younger  men,  if  indeed 
I  am  expected  to  give  advice  to  anybody,  is  to 
congratulate  themselves  that  by  the  will  of 
Providence  they  have  been  cleansed  from  this 
dangerous  quality,  or,  if  this  be  not  their  for- 
tunate case,  to  hide  the  possession  of  humour 
behind  a  mask  of  sustained  impenetrable  com- 
mon sense. 

Having  made  this  explanation,  to  protect 


62         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

both  my  subject  and  myself,  I  come  to  the 
analysis  of  humour  and  would  remind  you  of 
its  immense  variety.  It  was,  I  think,  George 
Eliot  who  said  that  nothing  was  a  more  seri- 
ous cause  of  diversion  than  incompatibility  in 
humour,  and  this  observation  may  also  remind 
us  that  we  ought  to  be  most  catholic  in  our 
judgment  of  humour.  It  is  fair  to  argue  that 
the  complexion  of  humour  in  different  coun- 
tries can  be  referred,  like  many  other  things, 
to  the  climate,  and  it  were  unfair  to  expect 
the  same  quality  from  a  Scot,  brought  up  un- 
der the  grey  skies  and  keen  east  wind  and  aus- 
tere buildings  of  Edinburgh,  as  from  a 
Frenchman,  nurtured  amid  the  brightness  and 
gaiety  of  Paris,  where  the  spirit  of  France  is 
at  its  keenest  if  not  its  strongest.  If  one  de- 
sired to  pluck  the  finest  flower  of  humour  — 
the  rare  and  delicate  orchid  of  this  garden  — 
I  mean  wit,  he  must  go  to  France  and  French 
letters.  In  the  French  novelists  and  journal- 
ists, but  especially  in  the  essayists,  whether 
he  desire  its  more  caustic  form  in  Pascal,  or 
prefer  it  lighter  and  more  cynical  in  Roche- 
foucauld, one  learns  how  swift  and  subtle, 
how  finished  and  penetrating  is  the  spirit  of 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       53 

wit.  Matthew  Arnold,  perhaps  through  his 
devotion  to  French  literature,  and  Mr.  Birrell 
through  his  native  genius,  proved  that  wit  has 
not  been  unknown  in  the  English  essays,  that 
fine  form  of  literature  whose  decay  always 
means  the  decay  of  culture ;  and  Charles  Lamb 
was  often  so  happy  in  his  wit  (it  came  more 
nearly  sometimes  to  the  English  fun),  and 
knew  how  dangerous  it  was  to  have  a  humor- 
ous reputation,  that  he  used  to  say,  "Hushl 
look  solemn.     A  fool  is  coming." 

But  it  may  be  frankly  admitted  that  wit  is 
not  acclimatised  in  England,  and  that  its 
flavour  is  not  often  tasted  in  English  litera- 
ture; for  instance,  the  following  conversation 
would  hardly  have  been  possible  in  London. 
Two  men  were  driving  along  a  Boulevard  of 
Paris  in  an  open  carriage:  one,  the  host,  a  suc- 
cessful and  sensible  person,  and  the  other  light 
anjd  clever;  and  the  conversation  of  the  mil- 
lionaire grew  so  ponderous  that  the  other 
could  endure  it  no  longer.  He  laid  his  hand 
upon  his  host's  arm  and  with  the  other  pointed 
to  a  man  standing  under  a  tree  and  just  within 
the  furthest  range  of  human  vision.  The  man 
was  yawning,  not  with  the  restraint  of  polite 


84         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

society,  but  with  the  open  enjoyment  of  our 
canine  friends.  "Look!"  said  the  bright 
man,  in  his  despair,  "  and  I  pray  you  silence. 
We  are  already  overheard."  This  seems  to  my 
poor  judgment  so  perfect  an  instance  of  wit 
that  I  do  not  supplement  it  from  literature, 
though  I  do  not  offer  it  for  indiscriminate  use. 
It  is  indeed  a  story  which  divides  the  sheep 
from  the  goats,  and  you  must  take  care  to 
whom  you  tell  it.  Once,  in  magnifying  the 
esprit  of  the  French,  I  offered  this  to  a  lady 
at  dinner  as  an  illustration,  and  she  promptly 
replied,  "  If  that  be  all  you  can  say  for  French 
wit,  I  do  not  see  much  in  it."  I  was  desolated 
not  to  have  had  the  approval  of  her  taste,  and 
ventured  to  ask  wherein  my  poor  story  had 
failed.  "  Well,  for  one  thing,"  this  excellent 
lady,  full  of  common  sense  and  good  works, 
replied,  "  How  could  the  man  hear  at  that 
distance?"  Then,  as  Matthew  Arnold  said 
about  Benjamin  Franklin,  one  knew  the  limits 
of  triumphant  common  sense,  and  as  I  had 
been  taught  in  the  days  of  long  ago  never  to 
put  any  lady  to  confusion,  it  only  remained  to 
confess  that  I  had  never  thought  of  that,  and 
to  thank  her  for  her  correction.  But  I  was 
fully  aware  that  she  would  only  be  the  more 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       55 

firmly  convinced  that  the  French  people  and 
myself  were  condemned  in  one  abyss  of  stu- 
pidity. 

If,  however,  wit  be  one  of  the  few  uncon- 
sidered trifles  which  the  English  people  have 
not  picked  up  in  their  world  mission  of  civili- 
sation, we  may  congratulate  ourselves  upon  the 
loss,  for  no  humour  is  more  futile  and  more 
dangerous  for  practical  purposes.  Wit  is  the 
inhabitant  of  clubs  and  literary  salons;  it  is 
the  child  of  cloistered  culture,  not  of  the  stir- 
ring market-place.  Pity  the  candidate  for 
public  suffrages  who  should  employ  this 
tricky  weapon.  Suppose  he  give  his  best 
point  the  keen  edge  of  wit,  it  will  doubtless 
touch  a  handful  in  the  crowd,  and  they  will 
flash  back  a  quick  response  to  him,  but  the 
other  ninety-nine  per  cent,  who  have  felt  noth- 
ing will  conclude  there  is  a  conspiracy  be- 
tween him  and  a  few  superior  people  to  insult 
them  and  shut  them  out,  and  they  will  regard 
the  speaker  with  silent  resentment,  as  one  who 
has  spoken  in  cypher  to  a  few.  You  need  not 
expect  any  man's  vote  or  any  man's  favour  if 
you  have  innocently  suggested  that  he  is  a  fool 
and  beneath  your  notice.  And  I  dare  to  say 
that  nothing  is  more  unpopular,  as  nothing  is 


56         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

more  undemocratic,  thanjwit,  which  is  the 
aristocracy  of  humour.  The  most  democratic  ^ 
form  of  humour,  and  by  that  I  mean  the  form,  ^ 
which  affects  the  largest  number  of  people  in^-^ 
the  shortest  space  of  time  and  carries  them  the 
farthest  distance,  is  the  characteristic  humour 
of  England  which  we  call  by  the  old-fashioned 
name  of  fun.  Fun  has  no  marked  intellec- 
tual quality,  and  makes  no  demand  upon  the 
hearer  save  that  he  be  not  cynical  or  misan- 
thropical. It  is  a  sense  of  the  obvious  com- 
edy of  life,  its  glaring  contrasts,  its  patent  ab-,,^ 
surdities,  its  ridiculous  mistakes,  its  mirth-  _ 
j)rovoking  situations.  It  is  the  humour  of  the 
public  schools,  of  the  railway  carriage,  of  the 
market-place,  and  of  the  playroom.  It  is  like 
the  air-bells  which  dance  upon  the  surface  of 
the  water  and  relieve  the  blackness  beneath. 
With  a  touch  of  fun  a  speaker  can  win  his 
audience  to  his  side,  a  master  can  sweeten  his 
relations  with  his  workmen,  a  clever  person 
who  could  make  good  fun  might  even  stop  a 
riot;  and  where  there  is  fun  a  father  and  his 
sons  are  bound  to  get  on  together.  Fun  has 
lent  a  certain  geniality  and  jolliness  to  Eng- 
lish life,  and  it  has  saved  public  life  from  that 
rancorous  bitterness  which,  as  Mr.   Bodley 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       57 

points  out  in  his  admirable  France,  disfigures 
French  politics.  Had  there  been  more  hon- 
est and  wholesome  fun  in  the  North,  Scottish 
life,  both  in  the  home  and  in  the  Church, 
would  not  have  been  so  grave  and  contro- 
versial. This  popular  humour  in  its  play  on 
words  has  its  best  exponents  in  Sydney  Smith 
and  Tom  Hood.  When  one  recalls  how 
Smith  told  the  little  girl  that  she  might  as 
well  pat  the  roof  of  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  in 
order  to  please  the  Dean  and  Chapter  as 
stroke  the  shell  of  a  tortoise  in  order  to  please 
it,  and  how  Hood  was  given  a  wine-glass  of 
ink  instead  of  his  black  draught,  and  promptly 
offered  to  swallow  a  piece  of  blotting-paper 
as  an  antidote,  one  is  simply  selecting  at 
random  from  the  bag  two  specimens  of  good 
English  fooling.  The  Pickwick  Papers  a.i- 
ford  a  very  carnival  of  rollicking  humour  in 
incident,  and  with  their  plea  for  charity  have 
done  more  than  a  multitude  of  sermons  to 
cheer  and  sweeten  English  life.  Whatever 
may  be  said  by  superior  persons  who  always 
apologise  for  laughing,  it  is  a  good  thing  that 
the  people  should  be  moved  from  time  to  time 
to  pure  and  kindly  laughter,  and  when  a  mob 
laughs  after  the  English  fashion  the  police 


58         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

may  be  withdrawn,  and  when  a  nation  takes 
to  laughing  at  folly,  then  folly,  whether  in- 
tellectual or  moral,  has  lost  half  its  danger. 
In  Art  one  has  pleasure  in  citing  our  admir- 
able Punch,  which  through  a  long  career  has 
sustained  an  honourable  tradition  of  purity 
and  dignity,  and  I  dare  to  say  we  ought  to  be 
thankful  for  the  service  our  caricaturists  have 
rendered  to  the  amenities  both  of  public  and 
private  life.  Our  English  humour  may  be 
simple,  as  a  Frenchman  or  an  American  al- 
lows himself  to  suggest,  but  it  has  its  own  ad- 
vantage. If  one  compares  Punch  with  the 
daring  illustrated  papers  of  Paris,  he  will 
have  a  fresh  appreciation  of  purity,  and  be 
thankful  that  what  we  laugh  at  in  England 
can  be  laid  upon  our  family  table.  And  if  he 
compares  Mr.  Punch  with  the  exceedingly 
clever  caricaturists  of  America,  he  will  have 
a  new  idea  of  English  good-nature,  and  be 
thankful  for  artists  who  still  believe  in  the  ro- 
mance of  marriage  and  the  beauty  of  simple 
emotions.  No  one,  for  instance,  can  examine 
the  work  of  Dana  Gibson,  the  American 
"  black  and  white  "  artist,  without  being  im- 
pressed both  by  its  intellectual  subtlety  and 
by  its  artistic  finish.     But  he  must  also  be  de- 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       59 

pressed  by  the  constant  suggestion  of  the 
weakness,  the  sordidness,  the  hypocrisy,  and 
the  hopelessness  of  human  society.  French 
and  American  caricatures  tend  to  lower  one's 
temperature,  but  English  caricature  in  its 
master  hands  tends  to  raise  one's  heart,  and 
to  inspire  one  with  faith  in  his  fellow-crea- 
tures, l^nglish  humour  may  prick  delusions, 
but  it  spares  us  our  dreams ;  it  may  play  round 
a  wilful  peculiarity,  it  never  jeers  at  an  ir- 
reparable calamity;  it  may  exhibit  the  foibles 
of  humanity,  it  has  a  tear  ready  for  its  sor- 
rows. It  is  the  humour  of  a  people  which  has 
not  yet  lost  faith  in  God  and  man,  which  is 
not  yet  convinced  that  the  law  of  life  is  a  nerv- 
ous scramble  for  gold ;  it  is  a  humour  which 
can  give  a  hard  blow,  but  always  with  the 
fist  and  never  with  a  stiletto,  and  forgets  the 
fight  the  moment  it  is  over.  Long  may  it 
flourish  in  English  life  and  English  homes, 
a  check  on  absurdity  of  every  kind,  a  cure  for 
melancholy,  an  incentive  to  humanity. 

The  Duke  of  Wellington  was  a  good  John 
Bull  in  all  his  ways,  and  had  his  hours  when 
he  enjoyed  a  bit  of  fun  and  found  it  not  un- 
useful.  Louis  Philippe  introduced  one  of  the 
Marshals  of  the  Peninsular  War  to  our  Iron 


60         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

Duke.  They  had  met  before  but  not  in 
Courts,  and  the  Marshal,  with  a  keen  recol- 
lection of  his  experiences  at  the  hands  of  the 
Duke,  forgot  the  perfect  manners  of  his  peo- 
ple and  his  own  generosity.  He  refused,  it  is 
said,  to  shake  hands  with  his  former  oppo- 
nent, and  even  allowed  himself  to  turn  his 
back  and  to  walk  towards  the  door.  The 
King  apologised  profusely  to  the  Duke  for  the 
Marshal's  discourtesy,  but  the  Duke  only 
laughed  with  a  big,  hearty  English  laugh, 
and,  looking  at  the  Marshal's  retreating 
figure  with  keen  delight,  said  to  His  Maj- 
esty, "  Forgive  him,  Sire.  I  taught  him  that 
lesson!" 

When  one  passes  from  England  to  Ireland, 
he  finds  himself  in  a  country  which  has  bred 
a  humour  of  its  own  —  a  plant  which  cannot 
be  grown  in  any  other  soil,  and  whose  very 
origin  cannot  be  traced.  Nothing  can  be 
found  on  the  face  of  the  earth  so  captivating 
and  irresistible,  so  unexpected  and  unreason- 
able, as  Irish  drollery.  It  seems  as  if  Nature, 
in  creating  that  charming  people,  had  in- 
vested them  with  all  kinds  of  bewitching 
qualities,  and  then  had  been  pleased,  by  way 
of  a  merry  jest  and  that  the  world  might  not 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       61 

grow  too  solemn,  to  have  inverted  the  Irish 
intellect  so  that  it  stands  upon  its  head  and 
not  upon  its  feet,  w^hich,  of  course,  is  the  cause 
of  bulls  and  all  the  other  quips  and  cranks  of 
the  Irish  spirit.  If  any  one  is  still  young 
enough  to  stand  upon  his  head  in  his  familiar 
room,  he  will  get  a  view  of  the  place  perfectly 
novel  and  surprising,  different  from  anything 
he  could  have  seen  when  standing  on  his  feet, 
and  the  account  he  will  give  of  that  room  will 
startle  every  person  by  its  originality.  In 
like  fashion  it  has  been  given  to  the  Irish 
mind  to  have  an  outlook  on  life  absolutely  its 
own,  to  go  into  Wonderland  with  Alice,  and 
to  live  in  a  topsy-turvy  world  where  in  truth, 
to  quote  an  older  classic,  "  the  dish  runs  off 
with  the  spoon,  and  the  cow  jumps  over  the 
moon."  If  the  just  and  honourable,  but  per- 
haps also  over-sensible  and  somewhat  phleg- 
matic persons,  who  have  in  recent  times  had 
charge  of  Irish  affairs,  and  have  been  trying 
to  unravel  the  tangled  skein,  had  appreciated 
the  tricky  sprite  which  inhabits  the  Irish 
mind,  and  had  made  a  little  more  allowance 
for  people  who  are  not  moved  by  argument 
and  the  multiplication  table,  but  are  touched 
by  sentiment  and  romance  as  well  as  vastly 


62         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

tickled  by  the  absurdity  of  things,  they  might 
have  achieved  greater  success,  and  done  more 
good  to  a  chivalrous,  unworldly,  quick-witted, 
and  warm-hearted  people. 

Lever,  beloved  by  schoolboys  in  past  days 
and  by  many  other  people,  admirably  repre- 
sents in  fiction  this  gay,  incalculable,  irrespon- 
sible humour  (who  has  not  rejoiced  in  Micky 
Free?),  and  he  is  also  supported  by  many  a 
short  story  teller,  such  as  the  author  of  Father 
Tom  and  the  Pope,  which  appeared  in  Maga 
in  the  days  when  the  Blackwood  circle  was 
the  admiration  of  the  land.  Some  pessimists 
fear  that  the  excessive  devotion  of  the  Irish 
people  to  politics  in  recent  days,  who  are  as 
delightfully  illogical  there  as  in  other  depart- 
ments, has  had  a  depressing  effect  upon  their 
minds,  and  that  we  need  no  longer  expect  the 
springs  of  Irish  humour  to  make  green  the 
wilderness.  But  this  is  taking  too  dark  a 
view  of  affairs.  The  Irish  priest  and  the 
Irish  resident  magistrate,  and  sometimes  even 
the  tourist  in  Ireland,  is  still  refreshed  from 
time  to  time,  and  goes  on  his  way  rejoicing. 
It  is  not  so  long  ago  that  an  Irish  peasant 
dreamt  he  was  visiting  the  late  Queen  Vic- 
toria, and  was  asked  by  the  Queen  what  he 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       63 

would  like  to  drink.  When  he  expressed  the 
humble  wish  for  a  glass  of  the  liquor  associ- 
ated with  the  name  of  Jamieson,  and  when  the 
Queen,  still  full  of  hospitality,  wanted  to  know 
whether  he  would  take  it  hot  or  cold,  he  was 
foolish  enough  to  prefer  it  hot.  As  the  kettle 
was  not  boiling.  Her  Majesty  in  the  dream 
hastened  to  make  up  the  fire  with  her  own 
hands,  while  her  thirsty  and  loyal  Irish  sub- 
ject waited  anxiously.  Alas  I  when  the  water 
came  to  the  boil,  the  noise  of  the  steam  awoke 
him.  "  Holy  St.  Patrick  I "  he  said,  with  in- 
finite regret,  "  I'll  take  it  cold  next  time.'* 
So  far  as  I  know,  the  Irishman  is  still  living 
who  was  sent  by  his  master  with  a  present  of 
a  live  hare  to  a  neighbour.  The  hare  es- 
caped and  the  servant  made  no  effort  to  pur- 
sue it,  but  that  was  not  for  the  reason  which 
would  have  affected  a  Scotsman,  that  he  could 
not  have  caught  it,  but  for  another  reason 
which  could  only  have  occurred  to  the  Irish 
mind,  but  to  that  mind  was  absolutely  satis- 
factory :  "  Ye  may  run  and  run  and  run,  ye 
deludhering  baste,  but  it's  no  use,  for  ye 
haven't  got  the  address." 

Various   pleasant   tales   have  been   going 
round  about  that  genial  Irish  Judge  who  died 


64         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

a  few  years  ago,  and  whose  death  diminishes 
the  gaiety  of  at  least  one  nation,  but  I  have 
not  seen  it  mentioned  how  he  explained  the 
working  of  a  new  Act  which  lowered  the 
qualification  for  Grand  Jurymen.  "I  will 
tell  you,"  he  said,  in  his  charming  brogue, 
"what  happened  at  the  first  Assize  I  took 
afterwards.  I  gave  my  usual  charge  to  the 
Grand  Jury,  and  I  said,  *  Gentlemen,  you  will 
be  pleased  to  take  your  accustomed  place  in 
the  Court,'  and  I  give  you  my  word  for  it,  ten 
of  them  went  instantly  into  the  dock."  Nor 
am  I  sure  any  one  has  placed  on  record  a  play 
on  words  which  it  were  an  insult  to  call  a 
"  pun,"  and  which  crosses  the  border  of  the 
brightest  wit.  A  man  was  tried  for  an 
agrarian  murder  and  witnesses  swore  that  they 
had  seen  him  commit  it,  and  there  was,  in  fact, 
no  doubt  of  his  guilt;  but  the  jury  promptly 
brought  him  in  "  Not  Guilty."  Whereupon 
the  counsel  for  the  prosecution  asked  the 
judge  whether  such  a  verdict  could  be  law. 
"  I  am  not  prepared,"  said  the  judge,  *'  to  call 
it  law,  but  I  am  sure  it  is  jurisprudence." 
And  it  is  only  an  Irish  Member  of  Parlia- 
ment who  could  congratulate  an  honourable 
baronet,  who  had  bored  the  House  with  an 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       65 

interminable  harangue,  upon  three  things. 
First,  "  upon  speaking  so  long  without  stop- 
ping ";  second,  "  upon  speaking  so  long  with- 
out saying  anything  " ;  and  thirdly,  "  upon  sit- 
ting down  on  his  own  hat  without  his  head 
being  in  it." 

It  is  natural  to  cross  from  Ireland  to  Amer- 
ica, but  it  is  not  easy  to  estimate  the  humour 
of  our  kinsmen,  because,  although  we  know 
what  it  has  been,  we  are  not  sure  what  it  is 
going  to  be.  If  environment  gives  the  com- 
plexion to  thought,  then  one  understands  why 
the  American  jests  should  be  on  a  large  scale, 
ranging  from  Artemus  Ward,  who  did  so 
much  to  delight  us  all  and  died  in  early  man- 
hood, to  Mark  Twain,  who  lived  to  complete 
a  task  of  the  highest  honour.  But  it  is  a  ques- 
tion whether  the  permanent  humour  of  that 
bright  people,  whose  brain  as  much  as  their 
atmosphere  seems  charged  with  electricity, 
will  not  approximate  in  the  end  to  the  Sal 
Atticum  of  France,  as  their  women's  talk  and 
dresses  remind  one  of  Paris.  Any  one  who 
reads  Life,  I  mean  the  American  Punch,  can 
recall  a  dozen  instances  of  wit  as  finished, 
as  caustic  and,  I  regret  to  say,  sometimes  as 
profane  as  any  in  French  modern  letters.     It 


66         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

seems  as  if  American  humour  were  between 
the  tides  with  the  old  school  of  the  Bigelow 
Papers  and  the  Innocents  Abroad  closing  its 
happy  career  and  the  new  school  hardly  yet 
in  evidence.  American  humour  at  least  illus- 
trates one  characteristic  of  this  hustling  mod- 
ern time;  it  is  suggestive  rather  than  exhaus- 
tive, and  never  can  be  anticipated.  Our 
fathers  not  only  endured  but  welcomed  stories 
the  end  of  which  they  could  see  from  the  be- 
ginning; they  honoured  every  intermediate 
station  with  a  preparatory  laugh,  and  when 
the  train  finally  entered  the  terminus  fell  al- 
most into  an  apoplexy,  and  then,  when  they 
had  recovered,  were  willing,  and  almost  ex- 
pected that  the  train  should  be  taken  out  and 
make  another  entry,  or  perhaps  two,  and  in 
every  case  it  would  be  received  with  fresh  ap- 
probation. This  obvious  jocosity  is  now  in- 
tolerable; the  modern  demands  brevity  and 
surprise,  that  stories  should,  in  fact,  be  con- 
structed with  a  certain  amount  of  art.  The 
modern  indeed  believes  that  while  Nature  in 
the  shape  of  an  incident  belongs  to  all,  its  ar- 
tistic representation  in  the  shape  of  a  picture 
is  copyright,  and  that  if  a  man  has  worked  on 
a  story  without  which  it  is  indeed  not  worth 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       67 

hearing,  he  ought  to  be  protected  in  his  rights. 
An  old  scholar  whom  I  know  holds  that  there 
are  only  ten  stories,  and  have  only  been  ten  in 
human  history,  and  that  they  can  all  be  found 
as  protoplasm  in  the  Greek  comedians,  and 
that  all  the  other  stories  are  only  evolutions, 
skilful  cross-breedings  or  adaptations  to  en- 
vironment. Nothing,  at  any  rate,  is  more  in- 
teresting from  a  technical  point  of  view  than 
to  see  how  a  master  in  the  craft  will  clothe  the 
barest  skeleton  of  fact  with  flesh  and  blood, 
or  how,  to  vary  the  situation,  he  will  take  an 
old  house  that  has  fallen  into  disrepair,  and, 
by  throwing  out  a  window  here  and  a  wing 
there,  by  re-facing  and  re-painting  and  very 
often,  in  the  case  of  old  stories,  attending  care- 
fully to  the  sanitation  (which  was  very  bad 
in  some  stories  of  the  past),  will  astonish  us 
with  a  new  house.  The  Americans  are  mas- 
ters in  the  art  of  construction,  and  provided 
you  are  not  in  the  secret  it  would  be  a  very 
shrewd  person  who  could  tell  where  the  story 
is  to  land  him. 

As,  for  instance,  a  lawyer  is  briefed  to  de- 
fend a  man  charged  with  murder  and  discov- 
ers that  his  client's  case  is  almost  hopeless. 
Anxious  to  do  his  best,  however,  he  interviews 


68         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

a  genial  Irishman  who  follows  the  calling  of  a 
professional  juryman,  and  pledges  him  to  be 
on  duty  when  this  case  is  tried.  "  And  re- 
member," said  the  lawyer,  "  whatever  the 
other  jurymen  want,  you  bring  in  a  verdict  of 
manslaughter."  Next  day  the  evidence  is 
even  worse  than  could  have  been  imagined, 
and  the  jury  are  so  long  in  coming  back  the 
lawyer  is  afraid  that  justice  has  miscarried. 
But  at  last  they  return  with  the  arranged  ver- 
dict of  manslaughter.  When  the  lawyer 
called  in  the  evening  to  recompense  his  ally, 
he  asked  him  what  in  the  world  had  kept  the 
jury  so  long.  "  I  never  was  shut  up  with 
eleven  such  obstinate  men  in  my  life  "  (a  very 
ancient  jest,  mark  you,  introduced  merely  as 
a  foil)  — *'  I  never  was  shut  up  with  eleven 
such  obstinate  men  in  my  life.  They  were 
going  to  bring  in  the  prisoner  '  Not  Guilty.'  " 
Before  identifying  the  humour  of  the  Scot, 
which  is  a  province  by  itself  with  a  clearly- 
marked  frontier,  it  must  be  remembered  that 
there  are  two  distinct  races  within  the  nation 
of  Scotland,  and  that  although  they  have  come 
under  the  conformity  of  one  land  and  largely 
of  one  creed,  yet  the  Scots  Highlander  and 
the  Scots  Lowlander  are  quite  opposite  types; 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       69 

they  share  neither  their  virtues  nor  their  vices. 
The  Lowlander,  the  man  of  Fifeshire  or  of 
Ayrshire,  is  self-controlled,  far-seeing,  per- 
severing, industrious,  with  a  genius  for  the 
accumulation  of  money.  He  fulfils  the  con- 
ditions of  success  in  the  modern  world,  and 
like  "  jingling  Geordie  "  in  the  Fortunes  of 
Nigel,  who  was  the  pioneer  of  his  race  in  suc- 
cessful emigration,  he  gathers  money  wher- 
ever he  goes,  and  would  make  a  fortune  on  a 
desert  island.  But  our  Highlander  is  impul- 
sive, imaginative,  gallant  to  a  fault,  and  re- 
gardless of  consequences,  pure  in  life,  cour- 
teous in  manner,  chivalrous  in  ideals.  He  was 
at  home  in  the  world  which  is  dying,  and 
made  the  best  of  raiders  and  fighting  soldiers, 
as  he  was  the  most  loyal  of  clansmen  and  the 
child  of  lost  causes,  dwelling  amid  his  moun- 
tains and  by  the  side  of  sea  lochs  in  a  country 
of  mists  and  weird,  lonely  moors,  dominated 
for  centuries  by  a  severe  and  unbending  creed. 
Fun  and  wit  were  impossible  for  him,  and 
yet  under  his  sombre  countenance  struggled 
something  of  the  ineradicable  humour  of  the 
Celt.  His  humour,  so  far  as  it  can  be  defined, 
is  a  kind  of  solemn  and  long  drawn-out 
waggery  which  he  tastes  without  a  smile,  and 


70         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

of  which  one  would  suppose  that  he  is  some- 
times unconscious. 

"  Who  had  this  place  last  year?  "  asked  a 
shooting  tenant  of  his  keeper. 

"Well,"  said  Donald,  "I'm  not  denying 
that  he  wass  an  Englishman,  and  he  wass  a 
good  man,  oh  yes,  and  went  to  kirk  and  shot 
fery  well.  But  he  wass  narrow,  fery  nar- 
row." 

"Narrow,"  said  the  tenant  in  amazement, 
for  the  charge  was  generally  the  other  way 
about.     "  What  was  he  narrow  in?  " 

"  Well,"  said  Donald,  "  I  will  be  telling 
you,  and  it  wass  this  way.  The  twelfth  wass 
a  fery  good  day  and  we  had  fifty-two  brace, 
but  it  wass  warm,  oh  yes,  fery  warm,  and 
when  we  came  back  to  the  lodge  the  gentle- 
man will  say  to  me,  '  It  iss  warm,'  and  I  will 
not  be  contradicting  him.  Then  he  will  be 
saying,  *You  will  be  thirsty,  Donald,'  and  I 
will  not  be  contradicting  him.  Then  he  will 
take  out  his  flask  and  be  speaking  about  a 
dram,  and  I  will  not  be  contradicting  him  but 
will  just  say,  *  Toots,  toots.'  And  then  when 
the  glass  wass  half  full  I  will  say,  just  for  po- 
liteness, *  Stop,'  and  he  stopped.  Oh  yes,  a 
fery  narrow  manl "     In  fact,  as  Donald  sug- 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       71 

gested,  a  mere  literalist,  held  in  the  bondage 
of  the  letter  and  without  the  liberty  of  the 
spirit. 

Another  tenant  was  making  arrangements 
for  the  coming  winter  before  he  went  South, 
and  told  the  keeper  to  get  the  woman  who  had 
looked  after  the  lodge  the  previous  winter  to 
take  charge  of  it  again. 

"  You  will  be  meaning  Janet  Cameron,  but 
I  am  not  advising  you  to  have  Janet  this  year. 
Oh,  nol  it  will  maybe  be  better  not  to  have 
Janet  this  winter." 

"  Why,  what  was  wrong  with  her?  "  and 
then,  with  that  painful  suspicion  of  the  High- 
lander which  greatly  hurts  his  feelings,  "  Did 
she  drink?  " 

"  Janet,"  replied  Donald  with  severity,  "  iss 
not  the  woman  to  be  tasting.  Oh,  no !  she  iss 
a  good-living  woman,  Janet,  and  has  the  true 
doctrine,  but  I  will  not  be  saying  that  you 
should  have  her." 

"  I  see.  So  you  and  she,  I  suppose, 
quarrel?" 

"  It  iss  not  this  man  who  will  be  quarrelling 
with  Janet  Cameron,  who  iss  his  wife's  cousin 
four  times  removed,  and  a  fery  good  woman, 
though  she  be  a  Cameron." 


72         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

"  Well,  ask  her  to  take  the  lodge,  and  offer 
her  the  same  wages  as  last  year,  and  a  little 
more,  if  that  will  please  her,  and  tell  me  what 
she  says." 

"  It  iss  not  for  wages  Janet  Cameron  will 
work;  oh,  no!  that  iss  not  the  kind  of  woman 
Janet  iss,  and  it  iss  no  use  asking  her,  for  she 
will  not  come." 

"Well,"  said  the  Englishman,  getting 
nettled,  "  do  as  you  are  bid  and  give  her  the 
chance,  at  any  rate,  and  tell  me  what  she  says." 

"  No,  sir,  it  will  be  wasting  my  time  going, 
and  I  will  not  be  asking  her."  Then,  after  a 
pause,  "  Ye  would  maybe  not  be  knowin'  that 
Janet  iss  dead?  " 

Does  any  one  say  with  impatience,  why  did 
he  not  tell  that  at  once?  If  you  can  answer 
that  question  you  can  lay  bare  the  secret  of  the 
Celtic  mind,  which  is  the  most  complex  thing 
in  psychology.  An  Englishman's  idea  of  con- 
versation is  a  straight  line,  the  shortest  dis- 
tance between  two  points,  but  a  Celt's  idea  is 
a  circle,  a  roundabout  way  of  reaching  the 
same  place.  He  has  so  long  been  stalking 
deer,  and  other  people,  that  the  habit  has 
passed  into  his  mind,  and  conversation  be- 
comes a  prolonged  stalk  in  which  he  is  con- 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       73 

sidering  the  wind  and  the  colour  of  the  hill- 
sides, and  avails  himself  of  every  bush,  and 
then  comes  suddenly  upon  his  prey.  His 
mind  is  so  subtle  that  he  dislikes  statements 
of  downright  brutality  and  prefers  to  suggest 
rather  than  assert,  and  the  following  is  surely 
a  guarded  delicacy  of  suggestion : 

"  Why,  Hamish,"  said  the  Laird  to  a  young 
fellow  whom  he  met  on  the  road,  "  what  are 
you  doing  here?  Have  you  left  the  situation 
I  got  for  you?" 

"  It  is  a  great  sorrow,  sir,  to  this  man,  but  I 
could  not  be  staying  in  that  place,  and  so  I 
have  just  come  back,  and  maybe  I  will  be  get- 
ting something  else  to  do." 

"  Look  here,  I  don't  understand  this,"  said 
the  Laird.  "  Was  the  work  too  heavy,  or  did 
they  not  pay  you  enough  wages?  Tell  me 
what  ailed  you  at  the  place." 

"  I  would  be  ashamed  to  complain  of  work, 
and  there  was  nothing  wrong  with  the  wages ; 
but  it  was  just  this  way,  and  though  I'm  mak- 
ing no  complaint,  maybe  you  will  be  under- 
standing. There  was  a  sheep  died  on  the  hill 
of  its  own  accord,  and  the  master  had  it  salted 
and  we  ate  that  sheep.  By-and-by  there  was 
a  cow  died  suddenly,  and  we  did  not  know 


74         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

what  was  wrong  with  her,  but  the  master  had 
that  cow  salted  and  we  ate  her.  And  then  the 
master's  mother  took  ill,  and  we  were  feeling 
very  anxious,  for  we  will  not  be  forgetting  the 
sheep  and  the  cow.  And  the  master's  mother 
died,  and  I  left." 

Upon  the  English  habit  of  a  straight  ques- 
tion and  a  straight  answer  in  the  briefest  form 
of  words,  you  can  get  no  information  in  the 
Highlands.  If,  for  instance,  you  desired  to 
know  whether  the  minister  of  a  parish  were 
a  man  of  high  character  and  good  preaching 
gift,  you  would  have  to  introduce  your  in- 
quiry after  a  long  conversation  on  things  in 
general,  and  then  to  mix  it  up  with  a  multi- 
tude of  detail,  and  when  the  other  man  had 
replied  the  words  he  used  would  in  themselves 
be  quite  useless  for  quotation,  but  you  would 
have  found  out  his  mind.  One  of  our  most 
distinguished  Highland  ministers,  who  under- 
stood his  race  through  and  through,  desired 
to  know  whether  a  certain  candidate  for  a 
parish  had  approved  himself  to  the  people 
and  was  likely  to  be  appointed.  He  called 
upon  one  of  the  religious  worthies  of  the  dis- 
trict, being  perfectly  certain  that  if  he  found 
out  his  private  opinion  he  would  know  the 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       75 

position.  Duncan  knew  quite  well  why  the 
minister  had  come,  and  the  minister  knew  that 
Duncan  knew,  but  they  talked  on  the  weather 
and  the  crop,  and  the  last  heresy  case,  and  the 
spread  of  false  doctrine  in  the  Lowlands,  for 
half-an-hour.  After  that  they  came  as  it 
were  by  accident  on  the  name  of  the  candidate, 
and  Duncan  simply  covered  him  with  praise. 
The  minister  knew  that  that  counted  for  noth- 
ing. A  little  later  the  minister  said  to  Dun- 
can, "  I  would  like  to  have  your  mind  about 
that  young  man  " —  his  mind,  you  notice,  be- 
ing very  different  from  his  speech.  Then 
Duncan  delivered  himself  as  follows: 

"  Yesterday  I  wass  sitting  on  the  bank  of  the 
river,  and  I  wass  meditating,  when  a  little  boy 
came  and  began  to  fish.  He  wass  a  pretty 
boy,  and  I  am  judging  wass  fery  well  brought 
up.  He  talked  fery  nicely  to  me,  and  had  the 
good  manners.  He  had  a  fery  nice  little  rod 
in  his  hand,  and  he  did  not  fling  his  line  badly. 
It  wass  fery  pleasant  to  watch  him.  But  it 
wass  a  great  peety  that  he  had  forgot  to  put 
a  hook  on  the  end  of  the  line,  for  I  did  not 
notice  that  he  caught  many  fish,  but  he  wass 
a  fery  nice  boy,  and  I  liked  him  fery  much. 
And  it  iss  a  great  mercy  that  we  are  getting 


76         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

good  weather  for  the  harvest,  for  we  are  not 
worthy  of  such  goodness,  with  all  our  sins  and 
backslidings." 

Then  the  minister  knew  that  that  candidate 
would  not  get  the  parish,  but  Duncan  was  en- 
titled to  say  that  he  had  never  mentioned  the 
candidate's  name,  or  said  a  single  word 
against  him. 

It  may  seem,  perhaps,  that  the  range  of  hu- 
mour in  its  various  kinds  is  exhausted,  and 
that  no  distinctive  form  is  left  for  Scotland; 
in  which  case  it  would  be  the  first  time  that 
Scotland  has  not  had  her  share  in  the  division 
of  spoil.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  there  is  one  hu- 
mour that  has  not  been  touched,  which  may 
not  be  the  brightest,  nor  the  subtlest,  nor  the 
kindliest,  but  which  is  the  strongest  and  most 
telling  of  all.  It  is  that  humour  which  came 
to  a  height  in  Old  Testament  Scripture,  when 
a  Hebrew  prophet  set  himself  down  to  the 
elaborate,  merciless,  unanswerable  mockery  of 
idolatry.  When  he  describes  the  idolater,  re- 
solving to  add  a  new  god  to  the  furniture  of 
his  house,  and  anxious,  like  an  economical 
man,  that  this  new  piece  of  furniture  should 
be  an  heirloom  to  his  children,  choosing  a  tree 
that  will  not  rot,  making  a  contract  with  a 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       77 

clever  artisan  in  the  god-making  trades,  and 
then  dropping  in  to  see  the  progress  of  his 
work,  watching  the  wood  measured  off,  the 
workmen  resting  after  their  labour  on  the 
hard  material,  the  finishing  of  the  thing,  and 
then  the  inaugural  feast  when  he  worships  the 
god  that  has  been  made  out  of  a  log,  and  cooks 
the  feast  with  the  shavings  which  are  over,  so 
that  one  part  of  the  tree  gives  him  his  god  and 
the  other  his  dinner.  It  is  a  humour  which 
scorches  like  flaming  fire  and  bites  like  vitriol. 
And  to  this  humour  the  Scot  has  been  heir 
in  modern  literature  and  life.  The  Satires  of 
Horace  and  even  of  Juvenal  pale  before  the 
unlicensed  ridicule  of  Sir  David  Lindsay  of 
the  Mount  before  the  Reformation,  and  one 
cannot  mention  a  history  seasoned  with  such 
contemptuous  mockery  as  Knox's  famous  His- 
tory of  the  Reformation  in  Scotland.  Burns's 
Holy  Willie  and  Carlyle's  Latter-day  Pam- 
phlets show  how  permanent  and  how  virile  is 
this  spirit  of  hot  indignation  and  sombre  sar- 
casm in  the  genius  of  the  Scots  people. 

It  has  been  difficult  for  a  Scot  to  forgive  the 
good-natured  and  superficial  English  hu- 
morist who  not  only  denied  to  the  Northern 
folk  any  sense  of  humour,  but  enshrined  his 


78         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

charge  in  a  too  memorable  surgical  illustra- 
tion ;  but  the  Scot  is  much  comforted  with  the 
reflection  that  if  he  has  not  always  arisen  to 
the  play  of  simple  jocosity  or  the  jingle  of  a 
pun,  this  has  only  been  that  he  preferred  hu- 
mour of  a  severer  and  intellectual  kind.  The 
Scots  are  a  serious  people,  with  an  admirable 
gravity  of  mind  and  a  keen  literary  con- 
science, and  their  nature  does  not  allow  them 
to  take  humour  so  lightly  and  irresponsibly  as 
their  Southern  neighbours.  If  a  jest  calls  at 
an  English  door,  and  especially  if  he  be 
dressed  with  an  obvious  simplicity,  then  it  re- 
ceives a  ready  welcome,  and  if  the  walls  of  the 
house  be  also  extremely  Southern  the  people 
next  door  will  know  their  neighbour  has  been 
amused,  and  next  day  the  worthy  man  will  be 
introducing  his  jest  in  public  conveyances, 
and  even  impressing  it  upon  friends  with  his 
thumb.  It  is  impossible  not  to  admire  this 
childlike  simplicity  of  nature,  this  willingness 
to  be  amused  on  easy  terms,  but  it  is  not  the 
blame  of  the  Scot  that  his  brain  is  somewhat 
more  complicated  and  that  his  demands  are 
more  exacting.  When  a  jest  calls  at  a  Scot's 
door,  he  is  inclined  to  look  out  at  the  upper 
window  and  to  inquire  if  it  be  a  jest  at  all ;  but 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS        79 

if  he  is  finally  convinced  that  it  is  no  pre- 
tender, which  may  not  be  for  four-and-twenty 
hours  of  careful  examination,  none  will  give 
the  visitor  more  hearty  welcome.  Even  then 
he  may  not  laugh,  but  may  indeed  look  more 
serious  than  before;  but  surely,  if  there  be  a 
sorrow  too  deep  for  tears,  there  may  be  a  hu- 
mour too  high  for  laughter,  and  in  the  very 
earnestness  of  the  Scot's  face  under  the  enjoy- 
ment of  a  joke  you  have  a  proof  of  the  sincer- 
ity of  his  tribute  to  humour. 

If  fun  be  a  sense  of  the  delightful  comedy 
of  things,  irony,  the  humour  of  the  Scots,  is 
a  sense  of  the  underlying  tragedy  of  things,  of 
the  contradictions  and  mysteries  of  life,  which 
have  in  them  a  sad  absurdity.  It  is  the  sport 
of  the  immortals.  From  this  irony  he  never 
quite  escapes,  and  his  humour  therefore  can 
never  have  the  gay  abandonment  and  rollick- 
ing exuberance  of  Southern  people,  but  will 
always  be  somewhat  austere  and  restrained, 
and  move  in  the  shadow  rather  than  in  the 
light.  The  helplessness  of  men  in  the  hands 
of  Almighty  and  inscrutable  powers  is  always 
present  to  the  Scots  mind  and  is  a  check  upon 
gaiety.  If  in  a  thoughtless  moment  you  con- 
gratulate a  Scots  mother  upon  her  child  with 


80         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

some  freedom  of  speech,  saying,  "  What  a 
bonnie  bairn  that  is,"  the  anxious  mother  will 
instantly  reply,  "  Her  face  is  well  enough  if 
her  heart  was  right,  but  for  ony  sake  be  quiet, 
for  there's  no  sayin'  what  may  happen.  I 
never  saw  a  height  without  a  howe."  There 
is  a  phrase  common  on  Scots  tongues  which 
illuminates  the  background  of  the  Scots  mind, 
and  is  not  intended  to  be  profane,  because  it 
is  felt  to  be  true.  Any  extravagance  of 
speech  or  any  permissible  satisfaction  with 
success  is  called  a  tempting  of  providence. 
The  idea  is  that  if  we  walk  humbly  and 
quietly  the  unseen  powers  will  leave  us  alone, 
poor  creatures  of  a  day,  but  if  we  lift  our  little 
heads  and  make  a  noise,  the  inclination  to 
strike  us  down  will  be  irresistible. 

No  man  comes  off  so  well  at  a  wedding  as 
an  Englishman,  but  none  is  so  ill  at  ease  at  a 
funeral,  while  a  Scotsman  has  no  freedom  at 
a  marriage,  since  he  does  not  know  how  the 
matter  may  end,  but  he  carries  himself  as  to 
the  manner  born,  with  an  admirable  dignity 
and  gravity,  at  a  funeral.  If  it  be  not  a  para- 
dox to  say  it,  he  delights  in  funerals  and  counts 
them  one  of  the  luxuries  of  life,  for  our 
piquant  sensations  may  be  got  from  sorrow  as 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       81 

readily  as  from  joy.  Upon  the  ceremonies 
and  the  regulations  of  funerals  he  is  an  author- 
ity, and  is  both  very  learned  and  very  sensi- 
tive. 

"  Peter,"  says  one  mourner  to  his  neighbour 
at  the  tail  of  a  walking  funeral,  "  div  ye  see 
Jamie  Thompson  walking  in  the  front,  side  by 
side  wi'  the  chief  mourner,  and  him  no  a  drop 
o'  blood  to  the  corpse?  " 

"  Fine  I  see  him,  a  forward,  upsettin',  am- 
beetious  body;  he  would  be  inside  the  hearse 
if  he  could," — the  most  awful  and  therefore 
most  enviable  position  for  a  sober-minded 
Scot. 

According,  therefore,  to  the  Scots  idea,  it 
is  more  profitable  to  go  to  a  funeral  than  to  a 
wedding,  and  anything  that  would  detract 
from  the  chastened  satisfaction  of  such  an  oc- 
casion is  deeply  resented.  And  the  following 
conversation  between  a  dying  wife  and  her 
husband  would  only  be  possible  in  Scot- 
land: 

"  I've  been  a  guid  wife  to  you,  John,  a'  thae 
years." 

"  I'm  no  denyin',  Jean,  ye  hev'na  been  a 
waster.  I'll  admit  ye  hae  been  economical, 
and  verra  attentive  to  the  calves  and  hens." 


82         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

"  Ye'll  no  refuse  me,  then,  my  last  re- 
quest? " 

"  I  will'na,  Jean,  if  it's  reasonable,  but  will 
hear  it  first." 

"  Well,  my  mither  has  taken  a  terrible  no- 
tion o'  gaein'  to  the  funeral,  and  I  canna  get 
her  off  it.  Noo,  John,  will  ye  promise  to  hev 
her  wi'  ye  in  the  first  coach?  " 

"  Oh !  wooman,  ask  somethin'  else.  I 
canna  do  that." 

"  But,  John,  I'll  never  ask  onything  else 
o'  ye.  Ye  micht  pit  up  wi'  her,  juist  for  my 
sake." 

"  Weel,  Jean,  if  you  put  it  that  way,  I  sup- 
pose I  maun  agree;  but  I  tell  you  plainly, 
ye've  spoiled  the  pleasure  of  the  day  for  me." 

It  is  recorded  in  an  ancient  history  that 
there  was  once  a  heresy  trial,  when  men  were 
going  to  be  sentenced  unto  death  for  denying 
the  orthodox  doctrine  of  the  Mass  —  well-liv- 
ing men,  but,  no  doubt,  heretics.  Before  sen- 
tence was  passed  one  of  the  prisoners,  who 
had  been  wearied  with  many  questions, 
thought  that  he  might  in  turn  ask  one  of  the 
judges  a  question.  "  My  Lord  Bishop,"  he 
said,  '*  how  many  wives  have  you?"  As  his 
Lordship  should  not  have  had  one  even,  it 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS        83 

was  a  very  searching  question,  and  his  Lord- 
ship was  not  prepared  with  an  answer,  nor 
were  the  other  judges  anxious  to  be  questioned 
on  their  domestic  affairs. 

There  went  up  from  the  crowd,  it  is  told, 
a  "  sair  lauch,"  as  they  thought  of  the  bitter 
mockery  of  the  situation,  that  such  judges 
should  be  condemning  harmless  men,  free- 
born  Scots  also,  mark  you,  to  death  for  differ- 
ing on  a  mystery  no  one  could  understand ;  at 
the  moral  and  logical  contradiction  of 
it  all  the  spectators  sent  up  their  laugh  to 
Heaven.  Not  the  genial,  happy  laugh  of  an 
English  crowd  tickled  by  a  bit  of  simple  fun 
from  judge  or  bar,  but  the  fierce  raillery  of 
men  insulted  in  reason  and  outraged  in  con- 
science. The  men  who  laughed  were  not  to 
be  trifled  with,  and  their  Lordships  judged 
it  best  to  let  the  prisoners  go,  that  day  at  least, 
for  when  the  Scots  mob,  the  most  resolute  and 
dangerous  to  be  found  anywhere,  begins  to 
laugh,  it  is  time  for  tyrants  to  hide  themselves 
behind  iron  doors  and  the  swords  of  armed 
men,  and  even  then  neither  they  nor  their 
strongholds  might  be  safe,  for  this  laugh  is 
stronger  than  steel. 

There  is  therefore  no  humour  so  dry  and 


84         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

stringent,  with  such  a  bite  upon  the  palate,  as 
that  of  Scotland,  and  if  there  be  any  bit  of  it 
more  grim  than  this,  I  should  like  to  hear  it. 
An  unhappy  Scot  was  condemned  to  death, 
after  a  careful  trial,  for  the  murder  of  his  wife 
under  circumstances  of  considerable  provoca- 
tion, and  the  verdict  was  no  doubt  a  just  one. 
There  is  something  good,  however,  in  every 
man  if  you  walk  around  him  long  enough  to 
find  it,  and  his  counsel  was  so  much  interested 
in  his  client  that  he  visited  him  in  the  con- 
demned cell. 

"  There  is  no  hope,  Robertson,  of  a  re- 
prieve," said  the  advocate  frankly,  "  and  you 
know  you  don't  deserve  it;  but  if  there  is  any- 
thing else  I  can  do  for  you,  just  tell  me." 

"  Well,"  said  Robertson,  "  I  count  it  very 
friendly  to  give  me  a  cry  like  this,  and  if  ye 
could  get  me  one  thing,  I  would  feel  easier 
on  the  occasion  " —  which  was  a  rather  felici- 
tous name  for  the  coming  function.  "  Could 
ye  get  me  ma  Sabbath  blacks?  for  I  would  like 
to  wear  them." 

"  Well,"  said  the  advocate,  "  I  daresay  I 
could.  But  what  in  the  world,  Robertson,  do 
you  want  to  wear  your  Sabbath  clothes  for  on 
the     .     .     .     occasion?" 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       85 

"  I  thought  maybe  you  would  see  that  for 
yourself,  sir.  Just  as  a  mark  of  respect  for 
the  deceased," 

But  I  should  not  wish  to  part  with  Scots 
humour  in  such  a  sombre  atmosphere  as  that 
of  my  last  illustration,  and  the  following 
is  lighter,  though  still  touched  beneath  the 
surface  with  the  sense  of  the  awfulness  of 
life. 

Among  all  the  ministers  of  the  Scots  Kirk 
perhaps  the  most  characteristic  of  the  last  gen- 
eration was  Dr.  Norman  Macleod,  the  chap- 
lain of  Queen  Victoria  and  the  friend  of  every 
person  in  Scotland.  Working-men  turned 
to  look  at  him  as  he  went  down  the  street,  say- 
ing one  to  another,  "  There  goes  Norman. 
He's  looking  well  the  day."  And  when  the 
people  strip  off  a  man's  title  and  call  him 
among  themselves  by  his  Christian  name,  then 
his  place  is  in  the  people's  heart. 

One  day  the  minister  of  the  next  parish  to 
that  of  Dr.  Macleod  was  sent  for  to  see  a 
working-man  who  was  dangerously  ill. 
After  he  had  visited  him  in  his  bedroom,  he 
came  into  the  kitchen  to  have  some  conversa- 
tion with  the  man's  wife. 

"  Your  husband  is  very  low.     I  hope  he 


86         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

may  be  spared.  I  am  afraid  it's  typhus 
fever." 

"  Aye,  aye,"  the  wife  replied,  with  mourn- 
ful pride.     "  It's  no  ordinary  trouble." 

"  I  didn't  know  your  husband's  face,  and  I 
didn't  want  to  ask  him  questions.  Do  you 
attend  St.  Luke's  Church?  " 

"  Na,  na,"  with  a  fine  flavour  of  contempt 
both  for  St.  Luke's  and  its  minister;  "  we  gang 
to  Norman's." 

"Well,  that's  all  right;  you  couldn't  go  to 
a  better.     But  why  did  you  send  for  me?  " 

"  Losh  bless  ye,  sir  I  div  ye  think  that  we 
wad  risk  Norman  wi'  typhus  fever?  " 

Whether  humour  be  grim  or  gay,  there  are 
certain  conditions  by  which  it  ought  to  be 
bound  in  the  judgment  of  all  right-thinking 
folk.  It  must  not  be  profane,  tearing  down 
with  a  clown's  hand  the  veil  which  hides  the 
holiest  of  all  in  human  life,  and  turning  life's 
great  mystery  into  a  petty  comedy.  It  must 
not  be  unclean,  bringing  the  blush  to  the  cheek 
of  modesty,  or  offending  the  taste  of  self-re- 
specting people.  It  must  not  be  cruel,  put- 
ting the  simple  to  confusion  or  wounding 
those  who,  through  their  disabilities,  suffer 
enough  already.  It  must  be  used  to  brighten 
the  day  and  make  us  forget  the  tedium  of  the 


HUMOUR:  AN  ANALYSIS       87 

journey;  to  give  us  a  better  understanding  of 
life  and  its  infinite  varieties ;  gentle  to  chasten 
innocent  foolishness  and  sharply  to  rebuke 
wilful  evil-doing.  Humour  must  also  be  kept 
in  its  own  place  and  not  be  allowed  to  rob 
life  of  its  seriousness  or  speech  of  its  dignity; 
and  we  may  all  lay  to  heart  the  story  with 
which  George  Eliot  concludes  her  timely  es- 
say on  "  Debasing  the  Moral  Currency  " : — 
"  The  Tirynthians,  according  to  an  ancient 
story  reported  by  Athenaeus,  becoming  con- 
scious that  their  trick  of  laughter  at  every- 
thing and  nothing  was  making  them  unfit  for 
the  conduct  of  serious  affairs,  appealed  to  the 
Delphic  oracle  for  some  means  of  cure.  The 
god  prescribed  a  peculiar  form  of  sacrifice, 
which  would  be  effective  if  they  could  carry 
it  through  without  laughing.  They  did  their 
best,  but  the  flimsy  joke  of  a  boy  upset  their 
unaccustomed  gravity,  and  in  this  way  the 
oracle  taught  them  that  even  the  gods  could 
not  prescribe  a  quick  cure  for  a  long  vitiation, 
or  give  power  and  dignity  to  a  people  who,  in 
a  crisis  of  the  public  well-being,  were  at  the 
mercy  of  a  poor  jest." 


ROBERT    BURNS:    THE    VOICE    OF 
THE  SCOTS  PEOPLE 


ROBERT    BURNS:   THE   VOICE   OF 
THE  SCOTS  PEOPLE 

WHEN  one  writes  on  Robert  Burns 
with  the  hope  of  interesting  Scots 
people,  one  is  embarrassed  by  this 
double  difficulty  that  the  subject  of  this  article 
presents  so  many  different  points  of  interest, 
and  the  audience  to  whom  it  is  addressed  is  es- 
sentially though  justly  critical.  Both  diffi- 
culties point  to  the  same  solution,  and  assist  a 
writer  in  bringing  his  subject  to  a  focus.  I 
do  not,  therefore,  propose  to  discuss  the  tech- 
nique of  Burns's  poetry,  as,  for  instance,  his 
metres,  or  to  go  into  the  history  of  his  poems, 
as,  for  instance,  tracing  some  of  them  in  their 
ballad  form,  or  to  assign  him  his  place  in  gen- 
eral literature,  or  to  review  the  work  which 
he  did  in  English  verse  and  prose.  I  shall 
confine  myself  to  one  point,  and  shall  speak  of 
Burns  as  the  outcome  of  the  Scots  spirit,  as  the 
representative  of  Scots  character,  as  the  Lyric 
Poet  of  Scots  life,  as  being  as  nearly  as  pos- 
sible the  voice  of  the  Scots  people.     Scotland 

91 


92         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

both  in  her  strength  and  in  her  tenderness, 
Scotland  with  her  virile  virtues  and  her  virile 
faults,  not  the  handful  of  people  at  the  top  of 
society,  not  the  refuse  at  the  base,  not  the  saints 
of  Scotland,  not  her  rascals  either,  but  the  na- 
tion, as  the  nation  is,  and  the  nation  has  done, 
and  the  nation  has  felt,  and  the  nation  has  suf- 
fered, that  Scotland  speaks  out  in  Burns.  He 
was  with  emphasis  a  Scotsman,  and  stands 
more  perfectly  for  Scotland  than  any  other 
writer  of  the  first  order.  When  he  wanders 
into  English  verse  or  into  English  letter  writ- 
ing, he  is  not  himself.  "  These  English  songs 
gravel  me  to  death.  I  have  not  the  command 
of  the  language  that  I  have  of  my  native 
tongue,  in  fact  I  think  that  my  ideas  are  more 
barren  in  English  than  in  Scotch.  I  have 
been  at  *  Duncan  Gray '  to  dress  it  in  English, 
but  all  I  can  do  is  desperately  stupid."  Some 
of  his  literary  friends  at  one  time  advised  him 
to  compose  in  English  lest  he  should  cut  him- 
self off  from  the  larger  public,  but  both  Mr. 
William  Wallace,  for  whose  admirable  im- 
partial life  of  Burns  every  Scotsman  and 
every  reading  man  should  be  most  thankful, 
and  Matthew  Arnold,  for  whose  estimate  of 


ROBERT  BURNS  98 

Burns  Scotsmen  at  least  are  not  quite  so  grate- 
ful, both  agree  that  in  the  English  poems  we 
have  not  the  real  Burns.  The  real  Burns  is 
the  Burns  who  speaks  the  Scots  dialect. 

For  the  first  feature  in  Burns  which  one 
faces  is  the  hardness  of  his  life  from  beginning 
to  end.  "  Scarcely  ever,"  says  M.  Taine, 
"  was  seen  together  more  of  misery  and  of  tal- 
ent. He  was  born  January  1759,  amid  the 
hoar-frost  of  a  Scottish  winter,  in  a  cottage  of 
clay  built  by  his  father,  a  poor  farmer  of  Ayr- 
shire —  a  sad  condition,  a  sad  country,  a  sad 
lot.  It  is  hard  to  be  born  in  Scotland,  it  is  so 
cold  there,"  concludes  the  Frenchman. 
Well,  it  has  been  bracing  cold  and  has  made 
strong  men,  but  one  may  sadly  admit  it  was  a 
cold  country  for  Burns;  from  his  birth  to  his 
death  he  might  be  said  to  have  lived  and  died 
in  hoar-frost.  One  inevitably  places  Burns 
side  by  side  with  Scott,  because  the  two  com- 
pletely represent  Scotland  upon  all  her  sides 
and  through  all  her  traditions.  Scott  is  pos- 
sibly the  finest  character  Scotland  has  ever 
produced,  a  gentleman  without  reproach  and 
full  of  charity,  and  to  him  Tennyson  paid  a 
just  tribute  — 


94         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

"  Oh !  great  and  gallant  Scott, 

True  gentleman,  heart,  blood,  and  bone, 
I  would  it  had  been  my  lot 

To  have  seen  thee  and  heard  thee  and  known." 

Before  Scott  died  he  suffered  cruelly  and 
through  suffering  came  to  his  height;  but 
Scott  belonged  to  the  class  which  is  largely 
shielded  from  hardship :  he  was  not  bom  into 
the  lot  of  the  common  people,  and  did  not 
taste  of  their  cup.  That  cup  Burns  drank  to 
its  dregs.  The  difference  between  English 
and  Scots  character  may  be  referred  among 
other  causes  to  the  bitter  struggle  which  the 
Scots  race  have  had  with  their  soil  and  with 
their  climate.  Mr.  Benjamin  Swift  says, 
"  The  Scotsman  expects  the  worst,  even  from 
God  .  .  .,"  while  "  the  Englishman  sees 
no  reason  for  doubting  that  the  Union  Jack 
is  flying  at  the  gates  of  heaven."  Whatever 
was  arduous  in  life  or  in  religion  Burns  ex- 
perienced, as  he  toiled  six  days  of  the  week 
and  heard  **  black  Jock  Russel "  thundering 
eternal  woe  on  the  seventh.  He  was  brought 
up  in  a  home  where  the  wolf  was  ever  at  the 
door;  he  served  as  a  ploughman  in  his  early 
years;  he  was  Unsuccessful  as  a  farmer;  he 
had  finally  a  poorly  paid  post  in  the  Excise; 


ROBERT  BURNS  95 

he  never  knew  the  meaning  of  ease;  at  one 
time  it  seemed  likely  that  he  would  have  to 
emigrate;  he  had  frequently  to  borrow  from 
his  friends ;  he  was  afraid  lest  his  body  should 
be  seized  for  debt,  and  after  his  death  a  sub- 
scription was  raised  for  his  wife  and  children. 
He  suffered  at  the  hands  of  his  father,  whose 
nature  was  soured  by  adversity;  and  he  was 
insulted  by  his  future  father-in-law,  who  did 
not  judge  him  worthy  of  his  daughter.  He 
was  disappointed  of  posts  he  wished  to  obtain, 
and  he  was  badly  treated  by  people  who 
ought  to  have  been  kind  to  him.  There  was 
hardly  any  care  or  humiliation  of  common 
life  which  he  did  not  share,  and  his  life  was 
one  long  toil  from  beginning  to  end,  redeemed 
only  by  the  affection  of  his  wife  and  the  loy- 
alty of  a  few  friends.  When  Scott  visited 
Ireland  in  his  old  age  a  woman  begged  alms 
of  him,  and  when  he  did  not  immediately  re- 
spond she  made  this  plea,  "  I'm  an  ould  strug- 
gler,"  whereupon  Scott  turned.  "  An  ould 
struggler,"  he  said,  "  and  so  am  I." 

Burns  did  not  live  to  be  old;  he  was  worn 
out  soon  as  many  poets  have  been,  but 
throughout  his  seven-and-thirty  years  he  was 
a  struggler.     He  had  just  one  pure  satisfac- 


90         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

tion  and  that  was  his  work,  the  inspiration  of 
his  soul,  and  he  has  described  his  own  battle 
and  his  own  victory. 

"  Now  Robin  lies  in  his  last  lair, 
He'll  gabble  rhyme,  nor  sing  nae  mair, 
Cauld  poverty,  wi'  hungry  stare, 

Nae  mair  shall  fear  him: 
Nor  anxious  fear,  nor  cankert  care, 

E'er  mair  come  near  him. 

To  tell  the  truth,  they  seldom  fash't  him, 
Except  the  moment  that  they  crush't  him; 
For  sune  as  chance  or  fate  has  hush't  *em, 

Tho'  e'er  sae  short, 
Then  wi'  a  rhyme  or  sang  he  lash't  *em. 

And  thought  it  sport. 

Tho'  he  was  bred  to  kintra  wark, 

And  counted  was  baith  wight  and  stark. 

Yet  that  was  never  Robin's  mark 

To  mak  a  man; 
But  tell  him  he  was  learn'd  and  dark. 

Ye  roos'd  him  than !  " 

Akin  to  the  severity  of  Burns's  circum- 
stances was  the  virility  of  his  character.  It 
has  not  been  for  nothing  that  the  thistle  was 
assigned  to  Scotland  as  her  national  emblem 
and  the  rose  to  England,  for  through  all  their 


ROBERT  BURNS  07 

history  the  Scots  people  have  been  proud  of 
their  independence,  jealous  of  every  neigh- 
bour, rooted  in  their  own  ways,  and  difficult 
to  coerce  either  in  politics  or  religion.  If 
they  fought  within  their  Kirk  —  and  the  Cal- 
vinists  and  Arminians  certainly  fought  hard  in 
Burns's  day  —  they  fought  also  for  their  Kirk 
and  their  Kirk  for  them.  If  they  had  some 
internal  feuds  in  Scotland,  they  joined  to- 
gether almost  as  one  man  against  their  "  auld 
enemie,"  England.  The  Scots  have  been  a 
democratic  people,  and  Burns  is  the  poet  of 
democracy.  There  are  two  perfect  war  pieces 
in  existence,  and  in  both  the  note  is  resistance 
to  tyranny  and  the  victory  of  liberty.  They 
are  not  the  jingoism  of  militarism,  or  the  rant 
of  the  pot-house,  they  are  the  song  of  patriot- 
ism ;  one  is  "  The  Marseillaise,"  which  cele- 
brated the  deliverance  of  France  from  cruel 
and  foul  oppression  under  which  neither  the 
honour  of  a  woman  if  she  were  poor  nor  the 
life  of  a  man  if  he  were  a  peasant  was  safe  at 
the  hands  of  the  nobles,  and  the  other  is  that 
war  piece  which  Burns  composed  in  a  thun- 
derstorm, and  which  stirs  the  blood  like  the 
sound  of  pealing  trumpets,  "  Scots,  wha  hae 
wi'  Wallace  bled."    Burns  was  not  an  an- 


98         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

archist  desiring  to  destroy  the  foundations  of 
society,  else  he  had  not  represented  an  orderly 
and  law-abiding  people,  neither  was  he  a 
cringing  sycophant  trembling  before  men  of 
high  estate.  He  believed  that  every  man  had  a 
right  to  live  and  to  think  for  himself,  and  that 
the  standard  of  judgment  must  be  not  gold 
and  silver,  not  titles  and  privileges,  but  mind 
and  character,  or  as  Burns  calls  them,  sense 
and  worth,  and  the  very  heart  of  the  strong 
Scots  folk  beats  in  these  verses  — 

"  A  prince  can  mak  a  belted  knight, 

A  marquis,  duke,  and  a'  that; 
But  an  honest  man's  aboon  his  might, 

Gude  faith,  he  mauna  fa'  that! 
For  a'  that,  an'  a'  that, 

Their  dignities  an*  a'  that; 
The  pith  o'  sense,  an'  pride  o'  worth, 

Are  higher  rank  than  a'  that. 

Then  let  us  pray,  that  come  it  may, 

(As  come  it  will  for  a'  that,) 
That  Sense  and  Worth,  o'er  a'  the  earth. 

Shall  bear  the  gree,  an'  a'  that. 
For  a'  that,  an'  a'  that, 

It's  comin'  yet,  for  a'  that, 
That  Man  to  Man,  the  world  o'er. 

Shall  brothers  be  for  a'  that." 


ROBERT  BURNS  90 

Tyranny  for  Burns  was  embodied  and  local- 
ised in  the  factor,  who  has  possibly  been  more 
detested  in  Scots  country  life  than  either  Laird 
or  Lord  or  any  other  ruler.  Burns  never  for- 
got the  threatening  and  insolent  epistles  which 
his  father  used  to  receive  from  what  he  calls 
the  Scoundrel  Tyrant,  and  which  Burns  de- 
clares used  to  reduce  the  family  to  tears.  He 
was  living  then  by  himself  in  "  the  cheerless 
gloom  of  a  hermit  with  the  unceasing  toil  of  a 
galley  slave,"  and  the  "  curse  was  clenched  " 
by  the  hard  hand  of  the  factor.  One  under- 
stands what  gave  the  spirit  to  "  Scots  wha 
hae  "  and  **  A  man's  a  man  for  a'  that."  Burns 
is  thinking  of  the  humiliation  and  helplessness 
of  a  small  farmer's  home  when  the  hand  of 
the  factor  descends,  and  I  do  not  know  that 
the  bitterness  of  the  Scots  heart  when  the  coun- 
tryman is  trembling  for  his  home  before  the 
local  tyrant  has  ever  been  better  described  than 
in  one  verse  of  "  The  Twa  Dogs  " — 

"  I've  notlc'd,  on  our  laird's  court-day, — 
An*  mony  a  time  my  heart's  been  wae, — 
Poor  tenant  bodies,  scant  o*  cash, 
How  they  maun  thole  a  factor's  snash; 
He'll  stamp  an'  threaten,  curse  an'  swear 
He'll  apprehend  them,  poind  their  gear ; 


100       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

While  they  maun  stan',  wi*  aspect  humble, 
An'  hear  it  a*,  an*  fear  an'  tremble  1 " 

One  cannot  read  the  story  of  the  elder  Burns's 
life,  or  Burns's  own  just  protest  against  rural 
tyranny,  without  praying  that  the  day  may 
soon  come  when  it  will  not  be  in  the  power 
of  any  man  to  close  fifty  homes  at  his  will  on 
a  country  side  and  drive  forth  fifty  families  of 
healthy,  contented,  loyal.  God-fearing  people, 
that  the  land  be  turned  into  a  place  of  sport, 
and  let  for  the  amusement  of  some  rich  alien. 
There  will  never  be  perfect  freedom  in  the 
land  till  the  people  be  rooted  on  the  soil,  and 
the  glens  and  straths  of  the  land  which  God 
has  given  unto  the  nation  for  a  heritage  be 
studded  with  homes  filled  with  country  folk, 

"  wonderfu'  contented, 
An'  buirdly  chiels,  an'  clever  hizzics." 

The  Jacobitism  of  Burns,  which  appears  in 
some  of  his  most  agreeable  poems,  such  as 
**  Wha  hae  we  gotten  for  a  king,  but  a  wee 
bit  German  lairdie,"  and  "  It  was  a'  for  our 
rightfu'  king,"  is  due  partly  to  his  heredity, 
since  his  people  seem  to  have  been  out  in  the 
Fifteen,  but  partly  of  variant  on  the  stern 


ROBERT  BURNS  101 

and  ineradicable  independence  of  the  Scots 
people.  The  Scots  are  logical  in  their  the- 
ology and,  although  this  may  seem  a  paradox, 
logical  in  their  politics,  for  they  fought  the 
Stuarts  when  they  were  in  power,  and  then 
they  fought  for  them  when  they  were  in  exile. 
They  could  not  abide  either  home  tyranny  or 
alien  tyranny,  and  being  a  romantic  people 
also,  the  most  romantic  royal  house  in  history 
appealed  to  their  imagination  much  more  than 
the  Hanoverian  Georges.  And  Burns  there- 
fore felt  no  inconsistency  in  singing  the  praises 
of  the  Stuarts  in  one  poem  and  celebrating  the 
spirit  of  the  French  Revolution  in  the  next. 

Burns  is  distinguished  even  among  poets 
by  the  breadth  and  depth  of  his  sympathy, 
which  indeed  has  no  limits  and  no  reserves. 
It  has  not  been  given  to  many  to  have  a  range 
which  includes  the  "  Cotter's  Saturday 
Night,"  wherein  Burns  celebrates  the  excel- 
lence of  simple  family  life  — 

"  To  make  a  happy  fireside  clime 
To  weans  and  wife, 
That's  the  true  pathos  and  sublime 
Of  human  life  "  — 

and  "  The  Jolly  Beggars,"  wherein  he  sings 


102       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

with  utter  abandonment  the  joys  of  Bohemian 
life.  Whatever  is  human  appeals  to  Burns  as 
it  did  to  Shakespeare,  and  therefore  he  num- 
bers his  clients  among  all  classes,  Puritans  and 
Cavaliers,  strict  livers  and  free  livers  together. 
In  the  simple  annals  of  the  poor  there  never 
has  been  painted  a  kindlier  or  purer  interior 
than  that  poem  whose  model  is  "  The  Farmer's 
Ingle,"  by  Fergusson,  where  the  priest  of  the 
family  offers  the  evening  prayer  to  God  — 

"  The  cheerfu'  supper  done,  wi'  serious  face, 

They,  round  the  ingle,  form  a  circle  wide; 
The  sire  turns  o'er,  with  patriarchal  grace, 

The  big  ha' -bible,  ance  his  father's  pride; 

His  bonnet  rev'rently  is  laid  aside. 
His  lyart  haffets  wearing  thin  and  bare: 

Those  strains  that  once  did  sweet  in  Zion  glide, 
He  wales  a  portion  with  judicious  care; 
And  *  Let  us  worship  God  I '  he  says  with  solemn  air." 

And  truly  this  is  the  highest  side  of  Scots 
life  — 

"  From  scenes  like  these,  old  Scotia's  grandeur  springs, 
That  makes  her  lov'd  at  home,  rever'd  abroad: 
Princes  and  lords  are  but  the  breath  of  kings, 
*  An  honest  man's  the  noblest  work  of  God.* " 

It  was  a  genuine  and  sincere  Burns  who  wrote 


ROBERT  BURNS  103 

those  words,  and  in  writing  them  he  celebrated 
one  of  the  high  virtues  of  his  people.  It  was 
also  the  same  Burns  expressing  himself  who 
described  that  other  interior  in  Poosie-Nan- 
sie's  lodging-house,  where  the  vagabonds, 
male  and  female,  are  gathered  at  their  supper. 
In  this  poem  Burns  lets  himself  go,  and  there 
is  no  question  he  goes  at  a  rattling  pace.  Many 
have  considered  "  The  Jolly  Beggars "  the 
strongest  thing  which  Burns  ever  did,  and  it 
were  difficult  to  mention  a  piece  with  such  an 
irresistible  swing  and  so  much  unreserved 
sympathy  with  unredeemed  humanity.  Upon 
this  piece  Matthew  Arnold's  balanced  criti- 
cism may  be  accepted.  In  "  The  Jolly  Beg- 
gars "  there  is  more  than  hideousness  and 
squalor,  there  is  bestiality;  yet  the  piece  is  a 
superb  poetic  success.  It  has  a  breadth,  truth, 
and  power  which  make  the  famous  scene  in 
"  Auerbach's  Cellar  "  of  Goethe's  Faust  seem 
artificial  and  tame  beside  it,  and  which  are 
only  matched  by  Shakespeare  and  Aristoph- 
anes— 

"  A  fig  for  those  by  law  protected ! 
Liberty's  a  glorious  feast! 
Courts  for  cowards  were  erected, 
Churches  built  to  please  the  priest. 


104       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

Life  is  all  a  variorum, 

We  regard  not  how  it  goes; 
Let  them  cant  about  decorum, 

Who  have  characters  to  lose." 

This  one  also  knows  is  a  side  of  life,  even  in 
the  Scotland  of  the  Covenanters. 

With  nature  in  her  every  phase  Burns's  soul 
kept  tune.  With  the  daisy  turned  over  by 
the  plough  on  an  April  day, 

"  Wee,  modest,  crimson-tipped  flow'r," 

in  whose  doom  h^  sees  the  fate  of  an  artless 
maid  by  love's  simplicity  betrayed,  and  the 
fate  of  a  simple  bard, 

*'  On  life's  rough  ocean  luckless  starr'd !  " 

He  feels  for  the  field-mouse,  whose  little  nest 
had  been  turned  up  by  the  plough, 

"  Wee,  slcckit,  cow'rin,  tim'rous  beastie  " ; 

and  again  he  moralises  in  words  better  known 
than  the  perfect  little  poem  itself  — 

"  But,  Mousie,  tfliou  art  no  thy  lane. 
In  proving  foresight  may  be  vain; 


ROBERT  BURNS  105 

The  best-laid  schemes  o'  mice  and  men 

Gang  aft  agley, 
An'  lea'e  us  nought  but  grief  an*  pain, 

For  promis'd  joy !  " 

And  he  is  furious  as  a  wounded  hare  limps 
by  which  a  fellow  had  shot  -^ 

"  Go  live,  poor  wand'rer  of  the  wood  and  field, 
The  bitter  little  that  of  life  remains." 

He  will  write  good-humouredly  of  a  crea- 
ture which  is  not  named  in  polite  society,  but 
which  he  detected  airing  itself  upon  a  young 
lady's  bonnet  in  the  kirk,  and  he  points  the 
moral  which  is  often  quoted  by  people  who  do 
not  know  the  subject  of  the  poem  — 

"  O  wad  some  power  the  giftle  gie  us 
To  see  oursels  as  ithers  see  us ! 
It  wad  frae  mony  a  blunder  free  us, 

An'  foolish  notion: 
What  airs  in  dress  an'  gait  wad  lea'e  us, 

An'  ev'n  devotion !  " 

He  has  a  kindly  thought  for  saints  and  sinners, 
for  beasts  and  men,  for  vermin  and  for  out- 
casts, for  witches,  and  even  the  enemy  of  us 
all  is  not  outside  his  charity.     And  I  will  not 


106       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

say  that  Burns  has  not  stirred  an  unconfessed 
echo  in  certain  hearts  with  a  last  verse  of  his 
"  Address  to  the  Deil  "— 

"  But  fare-you-weel,  auld  *  Nickie-ben  ' ! 
O  wad  ye  tak  a  thought  an'  men' ! 
Ye  aiblins  might  —  I  dinna  ken  — 
Still  hae  a  stake: 
.     I'm  wae  to  think  upo'  yon  den, 
Ev'n  for  your  sake !  " 

His  sympathy  with  the  wounded  and  the 
helpless  was  quite  consistent  with  his  merci- 
less satire  of  unreality  and  hypocrisy,  and 
therein  he  was  a  true  Scot,  for  irony  is  the 
characteristic  form  of  Scots  humour.  One 
can  taste  it  in  the  poets  before  the  Reforma- 
tion, like  Sir  David  Lindsay  of  the  Mount,  in 
Knox's  History  of  the  Reformation,  and  in 
modern  days  in  Thomas  Carlyle.  The  fla- 
vour is  not  wanting  in  Stevenson  and  Barrie, 
but  there  is  only  a  faint  suggestion  in  Scott,  as 
for  instance  in  that  pious  smuggling  merchant 
of  Red  gauntlet.  It  is  a  pronounced  and  ap- 
petising trait  in  Scots  literature,  and  survives 
pleasantly  in  a  distinguished  Edinburgh  news- 
paper, which  every  Scotsman  away  from  home 
reads  with  the  greater  relish  because  it  has  in 


ROBERT  BURNS  107 

its  columns  a  breath  of  the  snell  east  wind. 
Whether  it  be  Lindsay  or  Burns,  the  subject 
of  satire  in  Scots  letters  is  almost  always  the 
Kirk,  and  this  is  not  because  the  Scots  are  ir- 
religious, or  because  the  Kirk  has  been  alien, 
but  very  largely  because  the  Kirk  has  played 
such  a  part  in  the  history  of  Scotland.  The 
nation  and  the  Kirk  have  been  one,  and  the 
history  of  the  people  has  been  largely  shaped 
by  the  Kirk;  she  has  been  a  guardian  of  Scots 
liberty  in  many  a  crisis,  but  she  has  also  been 
a  very  severe  nurse  of  her  children.  The 
Kirk  and  Burns  had  their  own  special  quarrel 
in  which  no  one  can  justify  the  conduct  of 
Burns,  and  it  may  be  admitted  that  the  Kirk 
was  not  very  wise  in  her  treatment  of  him. 
Apart,  however,  from  any  provocation  which 
he  gave  to  the  guardian  of  morals  in  the  land, 
the  Kirk  in  the  eighteenth  century,  or  perhaps 
one  may  say  conventional  religion,  presented 
two  vulnerable  points  which  a  satirist  could 
not  resist  attacking.  Hypocrisy  in  its  ele- 
mentary sense  of  the  double  life  had  been 
raised  to  the  level  of  genius,  when  a  man  like 
Lord  Grange  spent  days  in  affecting  exercises 
of  penitence  before  the  sacrament,  and  other 
days  in  immoral  orgies.     An  extreme  Calvin- 


108       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

ism  was  also  preached  which  was  an  offence 
both  to  the  reason  and  to  the  conscience,  and 
one  can  easily  trace  the  connection  between  the 
high  doctrine  and  the  low  morals,  since  many 
were  convinced  that,  as  they  were  the  elect  of 
God's  purpose,  they  could  do  as  they  pleased 
with  His  commandments.  This  was  the  na- 
tional scandal  which  Burns  pilloried  in  his 
"  Address  to  the  Unco  Guid,"  and  his  descrip- 
tion of  the  "  Holy  Fair,"  which  was  said  to 
have  been  drawn  to  the  life,  and  in  the  most 
biting  piece  that  came  from  his  pen,  where 
indeed  the  parchment  was  the  flesh  of  a  man, 
"Holy  Willie's  Prayer."  Rabbi  Duncan 
used  to  say  that  there  was  only  one  heresy,  and 
that  was  Antinomianism,  which  really  means 
that  if  a  man  holds  the  right  creed  he  may  live 
any  kind  of  life,  and  this  destructive  delusion 
was  never  scarified  in  literature  with  such  final 
success  as  in  the  prayer  offered  by  the  sancti- 
monious and  evil  living  Ayrshire  elder. 

Antinomianism  is  pierced  through  the  heart 
as  with  a  dart  when  this  worthless  wretch  lifts 
up  his  voice  in  all  confidence  — 

"  O  Thou,  who  in  the  heavens  does  dwell, 
Who,  as  it  pleases  best  Thysel', 
Sends  ane  to  heaven  an'  ten  to  hell, 


ROBERT  BURNS  109 

A'  for  Thy  glory, 
And  no  for  ony  guid  or  ill 

They've  done  afore  Thee! 


I  bless  and  praise  Thy  matchless  might, 
When  thousands  Thou  hast  left  in  night, 
That  I  am  here  afore  Thy  sight, 

For  gifts  an'  grace 
A  burning  and  a  shining  light 

To  a'  this  place." 

With  this  severity  there  has  always  gone  in 
Scots  character  an  underlying  tenderness,  and 
one  makes  bold  to  say  that  Strong  as  Burns  was 
in  that  fierce  satire  which  played  like  a  flame 
of  fire  round  the  moral  faults  of  his  people,  he 
came  to  his  height  not  in  bitterness  but  in  kind- 
ness, not  in  comedy  but  in  pathos.  Matthew 
Arnold,  with  all  his  fine  insight,  made  several 
memorable  mistakes  in  criticism,  and  I  think 
he  was  not  perfectly  just  in  his  treatment  of 
Burns.  He  gives  him  a  high  place,  allowing 
that  although  his  "world  of  Scotch  drink, 
Scotch  religion,  and  Scotch  manners  is  against 
a  poet,"  while  the  world  of  Chaucer  is  fairer, 
richer,  more  significant  than  that  of  the  Ayr- 
shire poet,  yet  Burns  "  is  by  far  the  greater 
force."     He  insists,  however,  that  Burns  is 


110       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

wanting  in  that  note  of  high  seriousness  which 
is  the  infallible  mark  of  the  great  classics. 
Arnold  admits  that  Burns  is  not  deficient  in 
the  sense  of  the  tears  of  things,  and  one  would 
hold  that  he  has  established  his  place  among 
those  who  have  worthily  and  poignantly  de- 
picted the  tragedy  of  life  in  "  Ae  Fond  Kiss, 
and  then  we  sever,"  for  has  the  vain  regret 
ever  been  so  perfectly  expressed  as  in  these 
lines  — 

"  Had  we  never  lov'd  sae  kindly, 
Had  we  never  lov'd  sae  blindly, 
Never  met,  or  never  parted, 
We  had  ne'er  been  broken-hearted  " — 

or  in  "  Auld  Lang  Syne,"  especially  in  the 
two  verses  — 

"  We  twa  hae  run  about  the  braes, 
And  pu'd  the  gowans  fine; 
But  we've  wander'd  mony  a  weary  foot 
Sin  auld  lang  syne. 

We  twa  hae  paidl'd  i*  the  bum. 

From  mornin'  sun  till  dine; 
But  seas  between  us  braid  hae  roar'd 

Sin  auld  lang  syne." 

It  seems  to  me  that  in  another  poem  which  it  is 
true  Burns  did  not  so  much  create  as  adapt, 


ROBERT  BURNS  (    ^^O 

and  which  is  much  less  widely  known,  Burns 
comes  quite  as  near  to  the  heart  of  things  as 
any  man  who  ever  wrote,  and  I  think  it  is 
worth  full  quotation  -^ 

"  It  was  a*  for  our  rightfu'  King 
We  left  fair  Scotland's  strand ; 
It  was  a'  for  our  rightfu'  King 
We  e'er  saw  Irish  land, 
My  dear; 
Wc  e'er  saw  Irish  land. 

Now  a'  is  done  that  men  can  do, 

And  a'  is  done  in  vain ; 
My  love  and  native  land  fareweel, 

For  I  maun  cross  the  main. 
My  dear; 

For  I  maun  cross  the  main. 

He  turn'd  him  right  and  round  about 

Upon  the  Irish  shore; 
And  gae  his  bridle-reins  a  shake, 

With  adieu  for  evermore, 
My  dear; 

With  adieu  for  evermore. 

The  soger  frae  the  wars  returns. 

The  sailor  frae  the  main ; 
But  I  hae  parted  frae  my  love, 

Never  to  meet  again, 

My  dear; 

Never  to  meet  again. 


112       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

When  day  is  gane,  and  night  is  come, 

And  a'  folk  bound  to  sleep; 
I  think  on  him  that's  far  awa', 

The  lee-lang  night  and  weep, 
My  dear; 

The  lee-lang  night  and  weep." 

Matthew  Arnold,  in  spite  of  certain  disabili- 
ties for  the  criticism  of  Burns,  has  done  him 
on  the  whole  so  much  justice  that  it  may  seem 
ungrateful  to  complain,  but  one  must  insist 
that  if  sincerity  be  the  criterion  of  classical 
poetry,  Burns  is  not  wanting. 

Here  one  is  tempted  to  turn  aside  from  the 
main  road  and  make  a  brief  comparison  be- 
tween Burns  and  that  English  poet  who  es- 
sayed the  same  task,  and  who  owed  himself  so 
much  to  Burns.  Wordsworth  set  himself  to 
sing,  "  Of  joy  in  widest  commonalty  spread," 
and  he  certainly  has  dealt  with  common  life 
simply.  There  are  those  who  object  to  poetry 
being  mixed  up  with  philosophy  and  on  that 
account  disparage  Wordsworth,  and  there  are 
those  who  profess  themselves  unable  to  dis- 
tinguish his  poetry  from  prose,  and  who  per- 
mit themselves  to  make  play  with  Words- 
worth. On  the  other  hand,  a  select  number  of 
fine  minds,  fine  perhaps  rather  than  strong. 


ROBERT  BURNS  113 

have  always  taken  Wordsworth  for  a  prophet, 
and  one  critic  firmly  believes  that  the  poetical 
performance  of  Wordsworth  is,  "  after  that  of 
Shakespeare,  the  most  considerable  in  our  lan- 
guage from  the  Elizabethan  age  to  the  present 
time." 

Both  Burns  and  Wordsworth  dealt  with 
country  life,  both  wrote  plainly,  both  pointed 
their  moral,  both  had  their  message,  and  one 
need  not  ask  which  is  the  greater  —  it  is 
enough  for  us  to  note  the  difference  of  tem- 
perament, Wordsworth's  gentle  meditative 
verse  is  like  a  garden  lake  with  goldfish  swim- 
ming in  it,  Burns's  strong  stirring  lines  like 
the  mountain  torrent  carrying  everything  be- 
fore it.  Wordsworth  is  a  pleasure  ground 
with  simple  flowers  laid  out  in  beds,  but 
Burns  is  the  mountain  side  with  the  billows  of 
purple  heather.  One  cannot  forget  that  when 
Burns  met  Scott,  who  was  only  then  a  lad,  the 
poet  discerned  coming  greatness  in  him,  and 
laying  his  hand  upon  his  head  conveyed  to 
him  the  grace  of  literary  succession.  When 
Wordsworth  visited  Scott  he  received  with 
much  complacency  Scott's  generous  tributes, 
but  had  not  the  heart  to  make  any  return. 
'And  when  Scott  went  out  upon  one  of  his 


114       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

rambles,  Wordsworth  remained  in  the  house 
in  order  to  listen  to  the  reading  of  his  own 
poems.  Each  poet  has  had  his  own  reward; 
Wordsworth's  mission  has  been  to  an  esoteric 
circle  of  self-conscious  cultured  people  and 
anaemic  ecclesiastics,  while  Burns  has  been  the 
poet  of  the  people,  and  with  his  verse  so  arch, 
so  winsome,  so  tender,  so  merry,  has  thrust  a 
song  into  the  mouth  of  the  man  who  holds  the 
plough  and  the  woman  who  milks  the  cow. 
No  nation  has  such  love-songs  as  Burns  has 
given  Scotland  in  "  My  luve's  like  a  red,  red 
rose,"  "  The  rigs  o'  barley,"  "  Green  grow  the 
rashes,  OI  "  "  O  whistle  and  I'll  come  to  ye, 
my  lad,"  "  Comin'  thro'  the  rye,"  besides 
many  more,  or  such  songs  of  pathos  as  "  To 
Mary  in  Heaven,"  "  Ye  banks  and  braes  o' 
bonnie  Doon,"  "  John  Anderson,  my  Jo,"  and 
"  Auld  Lang  Syne."  It  is  his  glory  and  his 
claim  upon  national  gratitude  that  he  has  made 
a  proud  and  reserved  people  articulate,  and 
has  taught  them  to  sing  their  loves  and  their 
wars  in  lines  which  have  few  rivals  in  the 
lyric  poetry  of  the  world. 

When  one  is  celebrating  Burns,  and  espe- 
cially when  touching  on  his  love-songs,  one 
remembers  Lord  Rosebery's  words  concerning 


ROBERT  BURNS  115 

"  the  eternal  controversy  which  no  didactic 
oil  will  ever  assuage,  as  to  Burns's  private  life 
and  morality."  There  are  those  who  have 
done  their  best  to  minimise  his  faults,  and  I 
sympathise  with  the  pious  effort  of  Mr.  Wil- 
liam Wallace  in  that  direction,  and  there  are 
those  who  dwell  upon  his  faults  with  gusto, 
and  that  is  why  one  resents  certain  passages  in 
the  appreciation  of  Burns  which  concludes  the 
very  scholarly  edition  of  Henley  and  Hender- 
son. Why  should  Burns  be  specially  selected 
for  the  pillory  while  the  sins  of  other  famous 
men  are  passed  over? 

This  is  a  question  which  Lord  Rosebery 
very  justly  asks,  but  which  he  does  not  answer. 
Probably  the  causes  for  this  unwelcome  dis- 
cussion are,  the  close  connection  between 
Burns's  poetry  and  his  life,  his  poetry  por- 
traying its  most  deplorable  passages  in  auto- 
biography; and  the  other  reason  is  that  the 
Scots  Kirk  was  in  the  eighteenth  century  a 
severe  censor  of  morals,  and  Burns  was  not 
able  to  sin  in  private.  There  never  were  such 
Pharisees  as  in  that  century,  and  therefore 
there  never  was  a  more  bold  Bohemian  than 
Burns.  One  does  not  wish  to  linger  on  the 
subject,  but  I  would  offer  with  diffidence  two 


116       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

remarks,  certainly  not  by  way  of  apology  for 
evil  living,  but  in  order  to  place  Burns's  char- 
acter in  its  right  light.  We  cannot  apply  the 
same  standard  of  judgment  to  every  man,  we 
must  make  some  allowance  for  temperament, 
and  especially  for  the  rich  and  hot  blood  of 
poets  from  David  to  Burns.  It  would  have 
been  better  without  doubt  for  the  world,  for 
Jerusalem  long  ago,  and  for  Ayrshire  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  if  those  two  poets  had  been 
men  of  cold  nature  and  prim  respectability. 
They  would  not  have  sinned  and  they  would 
not  have  suffered,  and  it  is  likely  that  they 
would  not  have  written  their  masterpieces. 
Concerning  their  sinning  one  is  inclined  to 
quote  the  saying  of  a  great  Church  Father  re- 
garding the  fall  of  man,  "  O  beata  culpa." 
The  passion  which  sent  Burns  into  the  far 
country  opened  his  mouth  in  song,  which  is 
one  of  the  arresting  paradoxes  of  human  na- 
ture. 

One  also  would  like  to  remind  the  public 
that  Burns  was  not  a  sheer  Bohemian,  and 
to  protest  against  the  idea  that  unredeemed 
profligacy  is  a  necessary  condition  of  literary 
work.  He  was  not  a  Scots  Verlaine  whose 
life  was  one  course  of  foul  living,  abject  pau- 


ROBERT  BURNS  117 

perism,  and  occasional  crime,  varied  by  fits  of 
remorse  and  a  fine  play  of  genius.  Burns 
worked  hard  both  in  youth  and  manhood,  he 
celebrated  in  undying  verse  the  foolishness  of 
sin  and  the  virtues  of  domestic  life.  Amid  a 
conflict  of  temptation  he  married  Jean  Ar- 
mour, and  was  on  the  whole  a  kind  husband 
to  her,  and  a  good  father  to  his  children.  The 
faults  of  his  early  youth  were  many,  and  he 
never  was  a  model  of  flawless  perfection,  but 
he  was  true  to  the  great  tradition  of  Scotland 
in  magnifying  the  home,  and  his  own  home 
he  dearly  loved. 

When  one  tries  to  estimate  Burns's  place, 
not  in  general  literature,  which  is  beyond  the 
scope  of  this  article,  but  in  the  Scots  depart- 
ment, he  has  to  guard  against  two  ensnaring 
tendencies.  One  is  so  to  emphasise  his  origi- 
nality as  to  leave  him  a  solitary  phenomenon 
—  an  Ayrshire  ploughman  who  by  miraculous 
inspiration  suddenly  opened  his  mouth  and 
burst  into  undying  song,  a  Melchizedec  in  lit- 
erature without  father  or  mother,  beginning 
or  end  of  days.  The  other  is  to  treat  him  as 
simply  a  ballad  improver  taking  old  Scots 
verses  and  setting  them  in  order.  In  fact 
there  is  no  man  without  an  ancestry  and  few 


118       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

are  without  descendants.  No  great  poet  has 
ever  been  the  echo  of  other  people,  and  yet 
no  great  poet  could  detach  himself  from  the 
past.  Burns  was,  in  the  genuine  sense  of  the 
Scots  word  for  poet,  "  a  maker."  He 
brought  a  mind  of  singular  freshness  and  a 
genius  of  marked  individuality  to  his  work. 
It  is  also  true  that  there  stretched  behind  him 
a  line  of  Scots  poets,  writing  in  a  dialect 
which  connects  them  with  Chaucer,  Burns 
had  his  distant  ancestry  in  Lindsay, 
Montgomery,  and  Dunbar,  and  his  nearer 
forebears  in  Sempill,  Allan  Ramsay,  and  poor 
unfortunate  Robert  Fergusson,  whose  grave 
Burns  watered  with  tears,  and  whose  tomb  he 
built.  Many  of  Burns's  finest  poems  are 
based  on  ballads  which  passed  from  mouth  to 
mouth  among  the  Scots  people,  just  as  Shake- 
speare obtained  the  plots  of  his  plays  from 
many  quarters,  and  Chaucer  reproduces  Boc- 
caccio, while  that  great  Italian  was  himself 
only  a  collector.  As  Burns  has  been  justly 
censured  for  the  coarseness  of  certain  verses, 
let  it  be  never  forgotten  that  every  ancient 
ballad  which  he  touched  he  purified,  so  that 
much  Scots  song  which  otherwise  would  have 
to-day  been  buried  out  of  sight,  having  passed 


ROBERT  BURNS  119 

through  Burns's  hands  like  tainted  water 
through  a  gravel  bed,  has  flowed  in  purity 
into  the  main  stream  of  literature.  When 
Burns  began  to  write,  Scots  literature  was 
dead,  for  the  brilliant  Edinburgh  school, 
Hume  the  philosopher,  and  Robertson  the  his- 
torian, and  Blair  the  critic,  were  not  writers  of 
Scots  literature,  but  Scotsmen  in  English  lit- 
erature. Burns  was  the  heir  of  the  national 
tradition,  and  he  also  was  its  climax.  Per- 
haps there  one  must  correct  himself:  he  relit 
the  torch  of  vernacular  speech,  and  he  passed 
it  on  to  Scott,  ordained  by  Burns  as  his  suc- 
cessor. 

One  may  never  forget  Burns's  visit  to  Edin- 
burgh, which  is  always  a  superior  city,  but 
was  then  to  the  last  degree  high  and  mighty. 
I  do  not  say  that  Edinburgh  treated  Burns 
badly,  for  it  showed  him  much  kindness,  and  I 
do  not  say  that  Burns  did  not  impress  Edin- 
burgh, for  people  never  forgot  his  eyes,  which 
glowed  like  coals  of  fire,  and  men  like  Dugald 
Stewart  were  enthusiastic  about  his  conversa- 
tion. But  one  is  immensely  tickled  by  the  at- 
titude of  the  Edinburgh  critics  to  the  Ayr- 
shire poet,  which  was  one  of  good-natured  pat- 
ronage.    Dr.  Hugh  Blair,  whose  chief  eflfort 


120       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

in  criticism  was  affirming  the  authenticity  of 
Macpherson's  Ossian,  and  who  was  a  figure  of 
self-satisfied  gentility,  wrote  a  letter  to  Burns, 
which  is  altogether  delightful,  on  the  poet's 
return  to  Ayrshire.  "  You  are  now,  I  pre- 
sume," says  the  old  gentleman,  "  to  retire  to  a 
more  private  walk  of  life,  and  I  trust  will  con- 
duct yourself  there  with  industry,  prudence, 
and  honour.  In  the  midst  of  those  employ- 
ments which  your  situation  will  render  proper, 
you  will  not,  I  hope,  neglect  to  promote  pub- 
lic esteem  by  cultivating  your  genius."  And 
so  on,  concerning  which  one  can  only  remark, 
that  the  idea  of  Dr.  Blair  patting  Burns  on  the 
back  is  prodigious. 

One  is  much  interested  in  hearing  Burns 
upon  Blair.  "  In  my  opinion,"  says  the  poet, 
"  Dr.  Blair  is  merely  an  astonishing  proof  of 
what  industry  and  application  can  do;  he  has 
a  heart  not  of  the  finest  water,  but  far  from  be- 
ing an  ordinary  one;  in  short,  he  is  a  truly 
worthy  and  most  respectable  character."  Ad- 
mirable! That  was  just  Dr.  Blair — "  a  most 
respectable  character  " ;  and  when  it  is  remem- 
bered that  Blair,  besides  many  lucrative  posts, 
such  as  minister  of  the  High  Kirk  and  Pro- 
fessor of  Rhetoric  in  the  University  of  Edin- 


ROBERT  BURNS  121 

burgh,  enjoyed  a  pension  of  £200  per  year  for 
his  literary  attainments,  one  wishes  that  Robert 
Burns  had  been  as  kindly  treated.  Poetry  is 
not  reckoned  a  remunerative  form  of  litera- 
ture, and  true  poets  are  themselves  rare.  Why 
should  any  poet  like  Burns  be  left  to  toil  and 
starve?  One  would  not  like  to  think  of  Burns 
as  a  poet  laureate,  a  kind  of  higher  servant  at- 
tached to  a  palace,  who  comes  at  the  summons 
of  a  bell,  and  takes  directions  about  an  ode  on  a 
birth  or  a  marriage,  but  one  would  have  been 
thankful  if  Pitt,  who,  as  Lord  Rosebery  points 
out,  passed  on  Burns  "  one  of  his  rare  and 
competent  literary  judgments,"  had  placed  the 
Scots  poet  beyond  the  reach  of  want,  and  since 
it  was  his  lot  to  die  young,  had  at  least  secured 
that  Burns  should  have  peace  in  his  last  days. 
But  there  is  a  just  fate,  and  Blair  had  his 
good  things  in  his  own  day  and  is  now  unread. 
Burns  tasted  little  else  but  misery  and  now 
has  come  into  his  kingdom.  "  Don't  be 
afraid,"  Burns  said  to  his  wife,  "  I'll  be  more 
respected  a  hundred  years  after  I  am  dead 
than  I  am  at  present."  The  hundred  years 
have  more  than  passed,  and  Burns's  hope  has 
been  more  than  fulfilled.  While  he  lived 
Scotland  had  begun  to  love  her  chief  poet, 


122       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

and  now  there  is  none  born  of  woman,  in  her 
long  history,  whom  Scotland  loves  more 
dearly,  for  Robert  Burns  was  bone  of  her  bone 
and  flesh  of  her  flesh.  He  shared  the  lot  of 
the  people  to  its  last  grain  in  his  labours,  his 
sufferings,  his  sorrows,  his  sins.  He  has  told 
what  the  people  think  and  feel,  and  love  and 
hate.  An  imperfect  man,  a  sinning  and  fool- 
ish man  if  you  please,  but  one  of  the  twelve 
great  poets  of  the  human  race,  and  in  every 
drop  of  his  blood,  and  in  every  turn  of  his 
thought,  the  poet  of  Scotland.  We  remem- 
ber the  joy  he  has  brought  to  our  lives,  and  the 
expression  he  has  given  to  our  sorrow.  We 
remember  how  he  stirs  us  as  no  other  voice  in 
poetry.  And  for  the  rest  of  it,  to  quote  a 
passage  of  wise  charity  from  a  delightful  book 
of  letters  published  within  recent  years,  "  the 
most  wholesome  attitude  is  to  be  grateful  for 
what  in  the  way  of  work,  of  precept,  of  ex- 
ample these  men  achieved,  and  to  leave  the 
mystery  of  their  faults  to  their  Maker  in  the 
noble  spirit  of  Gray's  *  Elegy' — 

*  No  farther  seek  his  merits  to  disclose, 

Or  draw  his  frailties  from  their  dread  abode 

(There  they  alike  in  trembling  hope  repose), 
The  bosom  of  his  Father  and  his  God.'  " 


ROBERT  BURNS  128 

Burns  himself  was  ever  anticipating  his  trial 
at  the  bar  of  human  judgment,  and  he  made 
his  own  irresistible  plea  for  frail  mortal  man 
in  the  immortal  words  — 

"  Then  gently  scan  your  brother  Man, 

Still  gentler  sister  Woman; 
Tho'  they  may  gang  a  kennin  wrang, 

To  step  aside  is  human: 
One  point  must  still  be  greatly  dark, 

The  moving  why  they  do  it; 
And  just  as  lamely  can  ye  mark, 

How  far  perhaps  they  rue  it." 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS 

ENGLISH  literature,  with  all  its  wealth 
of  genius,  does  not  afford  another  body 
of  fiction  so  wide  in  its  historical  range, 
so  varied  in  its  types  of  character,  so  genial  in 
its  humanity  as  the  series  of  romances  which 
will  be  known  while  our  speech  lasts  by  the 
felicitous  title  of  the  Waverley  Novels  — 
felicitous  not  merely  because  it  is  a  good- 
sounding  word,  but  because  in  Waverley  Scott 
struck  the  characteristic  note  of  his  fiction. 
From  Waverley,  which  appeared  on  the  7th 
July  1 8 14,  with  an  impression  of  one  thousand 
copies,  to  Castle  Dangerous,  which  was  pub- 
lished at  the  close  of  November  1831,  with 
an  introduction  sent  from  Naples  in  February 
1832,  was  a  period  of  seventeen  years  and 
twenty-seven  books.  Some  of  them  were 
written  at  white  heat,  the  last  two  volumes  of 
Waverley  in  three  weeks;  some  of  them  were 
written  in  agonising  pain,  as,  for  instance.  The 
Bride  of  Lammermoor;  many  were  written  to 
pay  a  debt  of  honour.    After  the  Fair  Maid 

127 


128       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

of  Perth  the  first  French  critic  of  our  day 
considers  a  rapid  decline  and  symptoms  of 
exhaustion  were  observed,  and  the  same 
writer  believes  that  in  dying  Sir  Walter  had 
not  taken  with  him  any  great  unfinished  idea. 
"  He  had  said  enough  for  his  glory  and  our 
delight  .  .  .  for  the  whole  civilised 
world,  a  generous  wizard  and  a  kindly  bene- 
factor." From  Count  Robert  of  Paris, 
which  is  cast  in  the  decadence  of  the  Byzan- 
tine period  — "  the  tame  worn-out  civilisation 
of  those  European  Chinese " —  and  was  a 
burden  which  poor  Scott's  now  "  staggering 
penmanship  "  could  not  carry,  to  St.  Ronan's 
Well,  which  was  contemporary  with  himself, 
embraces  seven  centuries.  To  the  age  of 
chivalry  belong  The  Betrothed,  The  Talis- 
man, and  Ivanhoe.  The  fourteenth  century 
has  the  Fair  Maid  of  Perth,  and  the  fifteenth 
is  represented  by  Quentin  Durward.  To  the 
sixteenth  century  are  assigned  The  Abbot  and 
The  Monastery  and  Kenilworth,  while  the 
seventeenth  lives  before  us  in  Woodstock  and 
Peveril  of  the  Peak  for  England  and  Old 
Mortality  and  the  Legend  of  Montrose  for 
Scotland.  The  eighteenth  century  is  richly 
endowed  by  The  Pirate,  the  Heart  of  Midlo- 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  129 

thtan,  Waverley,  and  Redgauntlet  and  Rob 
Roy.  It  is  an  achievement  of  the  first  order 
to  travel  through  so  many  ages  and  in  so  many- 
lands  with  unfailing  sympathy  and  the  most 
intimate  touch,  so  that  w^hatever  be  the  value 
of  Scott's  history  in  the  eyes  of  modern  criti- 
cism, nothing  human  w^as  strange  to  him  and 
everything  human  was  made  to  live  in  his 
pages.  As  Frederic  Harrison,  one  of  the  most 
eloquent  of  our  English  critics,  has  said :  "  We 
see  the  dawn  of  our  English  nation,  the  de- 
fence of  Christendom  against  the  Koran,  the 
grace  and  terror  of  Feudalism,  the  rise  of 
monarchy  out  of  baronies,  the  rise  of  Parlia- 
ments of  monarchy,  the  rise  of  industry  out 
of  serfage,  the  pathetic  ruin  of  chivalry,  the 
splendid  death  struggle  of  Catholicism,  the 
sylvan  tribes  of  the  mountains  (remnants  of 
our  prehistoric  forefathers)  beating  them- 
selves to  pieces  against  the  hard  advance  of 
modern  industry.  We  see  the  grim  heroism 
of  the  Bible  martyrs,  the  catastrophe  of  feud- 
alism overwhelmed  by  a  practical  age  which 
knew  little  of  its  graces  and  almost  nothing  of 
its  virtues." 

It  was  the  distinction  of  Scott  more,  per- 
haps, than  any  other  writer,  to  originate  the 


180       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

"  renaissance  of  wonder "  in  the  nineteenth 
century,  and  his  novels  must  be  judged,  not 
by  the  standard  of  historical  science,  but  from 
the  standpoint  of  imagination.  It  is  per- 
fectly true  that  he  places  Shakespeare's  plays 
in  the  mouths  of  men  when,  as  some  one  pleas- 
antly remarks,  Shakespeare  was  hardly  old 
enough  to  rob  an  orchard,  and  on  the  other 
hand  he  will  make  Shakespeare  die  twenty 
years  before  his  time.  When  Dr.  Dryasdust 
starts  to  examine  Scott's  romances  with  a  mi- 
croscope, I  am  prepared  to  believe  he  will 
find  a  thousand  inaccuracies  in  minute  detail 
and  also  some  intrepid  handling  of  the  larger 
facts,  and  I  would  offer  this  advice  to  the 
young  student  of  history,  when  he  is  intent 
on  dates  and  facts,  to  close  his  Scott  and  give 
diligent  ear  to  Freeman  and  Creighton  and 
Gardiner,  and  amongst  contemporary  Scots- 
men to  Hume  Brown  and  Hay  Fleming  and 
that  fine  young  scholar,  Mr.  Rait.  If  you 
desire  to  be  introduced  to  the  men  and  women 
who  made  history  and  to  see  them  live  and 
move,  not  pictures  on  a  wall  but  actors  on  a 
stage,  till  you  catch  the  glint  of  the  eye  and 
the  flush  on  the  face,  till  you  hear  the  burst 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS         181 

of  passion  and  start  at  the  sudden  glow,  till 
the  tears  come  to  your  eyes  at  the  real  trag- 
edy, and  you  laugh  aloud  at  the  pleasant  com- 
edy, then  turn  to  this  theatre  where  the  play- 
ers are  ever  at  their  best  because  they  are  sim- 
ply human,  and  the  play  never  wearies  be- 
cause it  deals  with  the  perennial  drama  of 
humanity.  When  we  desire  to  pass  a  meas- 
ured judgment  upon  the  political  or  religious 
principles  of  any  period,  then  must  we  seek 
some  other  teacher  than  this  romanticist,  but 
we  have  our  own  debt  to  pay  to  him.  At  the 
wave  of  his  magical  wand,  knights  rise  before 
us  in  their  steel  armour;  loyal  blundering 
Cavaliers  drink  "  a  health  to  King  Charles  " ; 
grim  fighting  Covenanters  sing  their  Psalm 
as  they  face  Claverhouse's  dragoons;  absent- 
minded,  kind-hearted  antiquaries  discourse 
on  their  discoveries;  hard-handed  Scots, 
soldiers  of  fortune  like  Dugald  Dalgetty  and 
Balafre,  and  broken,  thieving  caterans  like 
Rob  Roy.  No  one  has  ever  given  such  a  vivid 
likeness  of  King  James  VI.,  our  Scots  Solo- 
mon, with  his  awkward  body,  his  foolish 
mouth,  his  undoubted  learning,  his  timid  na- 
ture, his  kind  heart,  his  mean  ways,  and  his 


132       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

amazing  self-conceit,  and  every  student  of 
morals  must  be  grateful  for  his  masterly  study 
of  Louis  XI.,  so  orthodox,  superstitious, 
treacherous,  cruel,  able,  a  man  of  rat-like  cun- 
ning, set  amongst  the  gallant  and  honourable 
gentlemen  of  his  court. 

Mr.  Maurice  Hewlett  has  delighted  us  with 
an  artistic  portrait  of  Queen  Mary,  but  there 
is  not  in  the  Queen^s  Quair  any  passage  so 
commanding  as  that  when  Mary  in  Loch 
Leven  Castle  is  reminded  by  tactless  Lady 
Fleming  of  a  certain  masque  in  Holyrood; 
and  while  many  a  modern  novelist  has  tried 
his  hand  upon  King  Charles  II.,  it  is  in 
Peveril  of  the  Peak  we  get  our  most  vivacious 
picture  of  the  charming  manners,  imperturb- 
able good  nature,  political  astuteness,  unrec- 
ognised cleverness,  and  unblushing  immoral- 
ity of  the  Merry  Monarch.  It  sometimes  oc- 
curs to  one  that  no  writer  has  ever  done  more 
absolute  justice  to  the  Stuarts  than  Sir  Wal- 
ter, and  none  has  felt  more  evidently  the  ro- 
mantic charm  of  that  ill-fated  house.  He  is 
indeed  in  the  first  line  of  the  great  creative 
minds  of  the  world,  for  he  has  "  definitely 
succeeded  in  the  ideal  reproduction  of  histori- 
cal types  so  as  to  preserve  at  once  beauty,  life, 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  133 

and  truth,"  a  task  which  a  sound  critic  de- 
clares "  not  even  Shakespeare  himself  entirely- 
achieved." 

Out  of  this  large  and  wealthy  place,  the 
world  of  men,  in  which  Scott  was  as  much  at 
home  as  Shakespeare,  Scotland  was  that 
province  where  he  was  most  familiar  and 
where  his  hand  was  firmest.  "  There  is,"  said 
La  Rochefoucauld,  "  a  country  accent,  not 
in  speech  only,  but  in  thought,  conduct,  char- 
acter, and  manner  of  existing,  which  never 
forsakes  a  man,"  and  no  Scotsman  was  more 
entirely  Scots  than  Sir  Walter.  What  he  did 
not  know  about  Scotland,  with  one  or  two  not- 
able exceptions  on  which  I  shall  touch,  is  not 
knowledge.  He  had  gone  through  the 
length  and  breadth  of  the  land,  and  had  met 
after  a  friendly  fashion  with  all  conditions. 
Pawky  Scots  provosts  like  him  of  Dumfries, 
who  was  a  plain-spoken  man,  and  kept  right 
with  both  sides,  advising  Allan  Fairford  to 
keek  into  his  letter  of  introduction  before  he 
delivered  it,  and  hurrying  off  to  the  Council 
lest  Bailie  Laurie  should  be  "  trying  some  of 
his  manceuvres";  Bailie  Nicol  Jarvie,  so  in- 
nocently charged  with  self-importance,  and 
so  fearful  that  Bailie  Graham  should  get  a 


IM       BOOKS  AND  BOOE3IEN 

hold  of  the  ni^fs  proceedings  in  the  prison ; 
border  sheep  farmers  like  big  Dandie  Din- 
niont,  ready  for  a  fight  with  a  neighbour 
either  at  the  fair  or  in  the  Law  Courts,  but 
scornful  of  the  idea  that  he  should  take  away 
his  neighbour's  land;  local  factors  like  Mac- 
wheeble,  keeping  together  with  hard  toil 
tfacir  foolish  clients'  estates ;  Highland  chiefs 
like  M'lvor,  poor,  proud,  and  passionate,  yet 
loyal  to  their  cause  and  to  their  kinsmen; 
country  gossips  like  Meg  Dods,  the  masterful 
hostess  of  the  Cleikum  Inn;  pragmatical 
servants  full  of  argimient  and  advice,  like 
Richie  Moni plies  and  Andrew  Fairservicc; 
theological  peasants,  unwearied  in  contro- 
versy and  matchless  in  distinctions,  like 
David  Deans;  judges,  advocates,  sheriffs, 
sheriff-substitutes,  country  writers,  school- 
masters, ministers,  beggars,  fisher-folk,  gip- 
sies. Highland  clansmen,  country  lairds, 
great  nobles.  How  distinct,  how  vivid,  how 
convincing  is  each  person  in  his  album;  as 
you  turn  the  pages  you  identify  the  likeness 
by  the  representatives  you  have  known  your- 
self. Scott's  novels  have  been  translated  into 
every  civilised  tongue,  and  Scott  has  become 
the  most  valuable  commercial   asset  of  his 


WAVEKLBT  NOVELS 

counliy,  for  die  ends  at  die  caidi  oooie  to 
die  land  of  wfaicfa  he  is  die  ckcimM^  lad 
evciy  diird  Amencm  is  a  lineal  dfiffndji 
of  Queen  Maxy.  Widi  die  United  States  as 
an  annex  of  Scodand,  duoogh  die  mngnrr- 
ing  genius  of  Sir  Walter,  one  maj  not  maioe 
an  cxdosive  boast,  but  apart  from  Ameii* 
cans,  he  may  believe  diat  Soot^  gcnins 
reached  its  heigiit  in  the  novds  of  his  own 
country,  and  that  only  a  Scot  can  appreciate 
the  confident  and  f  anltlcsB  skill  with  wfaidk 
he  etdies  die  chanrtrr  of  his  people: 

Stevenson  caog^  the  romantic  ookmr  of 
Soots  life,  and  coold  describe  it  with  a  dis- 
tincdon  of  style  to  which  our  anthor  had  no 
claim,  and  in  his  Weir  of  Herwnstou  Steven- 
son has  given  as  a  powerful  Northern  type  of 
the  morose  order,  hot  he  was  not  in  toodi 
with  ordinary  life,  as  Sir  Walter  was^  With 
Stevenson  the  people  arc  apt  to  be  pictnTCsqae 
figures^  whom  he  has  lifted  on  and  brooglit 
into  his  stndy  as  artists  find  inspiration  by  ac- 
cident, and  tnm  it  to  accoonL  With  Scott 
they  arc  gossips,  men  and  women  whom  he 
has  known,  on  the  Tweed  and  the  bcndeis. 
He  docs  not  thrust  exquisitely  turned  phrases 
into  their  mouths,  but  he  leti  them  talk,  and  is 


186       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

pleased  because  they  say  the  things  which  in- 
terest him.  One  class  only  was  alien  to  him, 
the  mercantile  class,  which  was  finding  itself 
and  coming  into  its  kingdom,  and  passing  re- 
form bills,  and  doing  a  hundred  things  which 
Scott  did  not  appreciate.  He  gives  a  kindly 
part  to  "  Jingling  Geordie,"  because  Heriot 
was  a  benefactor  to  his  country,  and  did  not 
pass  from  his  own  place  at  the  beginning  of 
the  seventeenth  century.  And  he  deals  pleas- 
antly with  the  Glasgow  Bailie,  but  one  knows 
that  he  sympathises  with  Rob  Roy's  con- 
temptuous rejection  of  a  place  in  the  Bailie's 
business  for  one  of  the  young  Macgregors. 
Scott  did  not  set  himself  down  to  write  the 
novel  with  a  purpose,  and  his  stories  owe  part 
of  their  charm  to  the  fact  that  they  are  not 
studies  in  theology  or  the  sexual  question,  but 
consciously  or  unconsciously  they  teach  his 
gospel  about  society.  When  Carlyle  com- 
plained that  our  highest  literary  man  had  no 
message  whatever  to  deliver  to  the  world  he 
really  is  beside  the  mark,  for  Scott  was 
charged  in  the  marrow  of  his  bones,  as  Carlyle 
used  to  say,  with  a  creed,  and  it  was  one 
which  Carlyle  detested.  Every  novelist  of 
the  front  rank  who  has  produced  an  organic 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  137 

body  of  fiction,  whether  Balzac  or  Thack- 
eray, Flaubert  or  Zola,  has  a  spinal  cord  run- 
ning through  his  books.  It  may  not  be  car- 
ried to  the  tedious  length  of  Balzac,  or  the 
pedantic  genealogies  of  Zola,  but  it  dominates 
the  whole  and  is  the  pervading  spirit.  With 
Scott  it  was  the  ancient  and  dying  spirit  of 
feudalism.  He  was  a  stranger  to  the  strug- 
gle of  the  times ;  he  was  a  lover  of  past  ages. 
His  is  the  charm  of  autumn,  the  delicate 
colouring  of  a  summer  that  is  over.  He 
touched  no  question  of  religious  doubt  and 
stood  for  the  simplicity  of  faith,  and  one 
knows  he  is  speaking  for  himself  in  the  un- 
questioning reverence  of  his  cavaliers  for  au- 
thority, and  the  submission  of  Scots  peasants 
to  their  ministers.  According  to  his  idea,  so- 
ciety was  a  graded  order  (he  ought  to  have 
been  the  novelist  of  the  "  Young  England  " 
school)  wherein  each  rank  found  its  recog- 
nised place,  and  had  its  own  privileges  in  sub- 
ordination to  the  whole.  George  IV.  was,  in 
this  simple  faith,  an  almost  supernatural  per- 
sonage, and  the  humble  enthusiastic  loyalty 
with  which  he  welcomed  that  obese  and  very 
vulgar  monarch  to  Scotland  would  have 
greatly    delighted    the    cynical    humour    of 


188       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

Thackeray  and  shows  how  perfectly  qualified 
Scott  was  to  appreciate  a  cavalier's  attitude 
to  Charles  II.  The  Duke  of  Buccleuch  was 
his  chief,  whose  sorrows  he  shared  as  his  own, 
and  whose  recognition,  whenever  the  Duke 
was  pleased  to  write  to  him,  he  deeply  valued. 
For  himself,  he  belonged  to  the  gentry,  the 
third  order  after  the  King  and  the  nobility, 
and  above  the  farmers  and  the  tradesmen. 
With  him  were  lawyers  and  soldiers  and  the 
professional  classes  generally.  For  some  rea- 
son he  took  little  notice  of  medical  men,  and 
indeed  has  only  one  good  doctor  in  his  Scots 
novels  (the  apothecary  in  the  Fair  Maid  of 
Perth  is  detestable),  and  although  he  is  alto- 
gether admirable,  I  do  not  think  that  Gideon 
Grey  has  touched  the  popular  imagination. 
It  has  been  a  bad  tradition  in  literature  either 
to  ignore  or  to  depreciate  the  most  beneficent 
of  professions,  and  one  is  thankful  for  the 
slender  mercy  of  The  Surgeon's  Daughter. 
Each  class  in  society  was  to  be  preserved  in 
its  proper  rights  so  long  as  it  remained  in  its 
own  sphere. 

Scott  was  most  friendly  with  his  inferiors 
and  most  respectful  to  his  superiors  —  ever  on 
the  understanding  that  he  knew  his  place  and 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  189 

they  knew  theirs.  No  person  in  his  novels 
rises  and  is  made  a  hero  because  he  has 
climbed  from  poverty  to  riches.  The  self- 
made  man  hardly  appears,  and  when  he  does, 
he  is  treated  contemptuously.  Christie 
Steele,  the  prejudiced  old  housekeeper  of  the 
Croftangrys,  acknowledged  that  Mr.  Tred- 
dle's  mill  had  given  employment  in  the  dis- 
trict, but  Mr.  Treddle's  efforts  to  be  a  coun- 
try gentleman  only  excited  her  acidulous  hu- 
mour. When  Mr.  Gilbert  Glossin,  the  coun- 
try lawyer  in  Guy  Mannering,  conciliates  the 
pompous  baronet  and  obtains  a  most  conde- 
scending invitation  to  dinner,  the  achievement 
is  understood  to  reflect  credit  on  Glossin's 
adroitness.  And  Sir  Arthur  Wardour  is  fu- 
rious when  a  lawyer  addresses  him  in  a  letter  as 
"  Dear  Sir  " — "  He  will  be  calling  me  '  Dear 
Knight'  next."  The  Lord  Keeper  in  The 
Bride  of  Lammermoor  had  scrambled  up  to 
his  high  position  from  a  low  estate,  and  there- 
fore he  is  a  timid  and  propitiatory  man,  ill 
at  ease  among  country  sports,  and  afraid  in 
the  presence  of  the  haughty  young  lord,  who 
on  his  part,  poverty-stricken  but  ancient  born, 
dominates  the  Lord  Keeper,  as  a  hawk  would 
terrify  a  barn-door  fowl.     Lady  Ashton,  on 


140       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

the  other  hand,  one  detests  for  her  cruelty, 
but  respects  for  her  courage  —  the  difference 
was  that  she  had  good  blood  in  her  veins. 
Dugald  Dalgetty  was  a  sturdy  old  blade  and 
carried  a  conscience  in  him,  for  he  would 
never  take  service  with  the  other  side  till  his 
time  had  expired  with  their  opponents;  he 
was  a  man  of  his  hands,  too,  and  one  of  the 
most  vivid  scenes  in  all  Scott's  work  is  Dugald 
seizing  the  Duke  of  Argyll  in  his  castle.  But 
Dalgetty  shows  badly  beside  the  Highland 
chiefs,  because,  although  he  was  a  cock  laird 
in  Aberdeenshire,  you  can  see  that  after  all 
he  was  only  a  "  body."  Although  Scott 
laughs  at  Lady  Margaret  Bellenden  for  her 
aristocratic  prejudices  and  her  recurring  al- 
lusions to  Charles  II.,  he  has  a  sneaking  fond- 
ness for  her,  and  drew  her  character  from 
some  of  the  old  Jacobite  ladies  he  knew;  and 
although  he  makes  play  with  Baron  Bradwar- 
dine,  with  his  family  tree,  bears,  boot-jack  and 
all,  yet  you  feel  that  he  would  be  just  as  much 
concerned  about  his  own  pedigree.  He  be- 
lieves in  the  better  class  showing  kindness  to 
the  poorer,  and  there  is  an  atmosphere  every- 
where of  good  cheer,  but  it  is  the  kindness  of 
a  chief  to  his  clansmen.     His  men  drink,  and 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  141 

perhaps  put  away  as  much  as  Dickens's  heroes, 
which  is  saying  a  great  deal,  but  they  drink 
like  gentlemen,  not  like  grooms.     Mrs.  Gamp 
is  very  taking,  and  a  philosopher  in  her  own 
way,  but  she  would  be  quite  out  of  place  in 
the    Waverley   Novels.     There    are    homely 
women  in  them,  and  Meg  Dods  had  all  Mrs. 
Gamp's  force  of  character  and  native  resolu- 
tion, but  no  person  is  vulgar.    Among  all  his 
peasants  I  do  not  remember  one,  with  the 
doubtful  exception  of  worthy  Andrew  Fair- 
service,  who  is  mean.     His  poor  Highlanders, 
the  "  Dougal  cratur "  and  the  rest  of  them, 
and  his  Lowland  ploughmen,  Cuddie  Head- 
rigg,  for  instance,  all  command  respect,  as 
sound-minded  and  able-bodied  men,  just  as 
much  as  their  masters  in  their  place.     One  of 
the    finest    and    most    discriminating   things 
Scott  ever  did  is  the  story  of  the  two  drovers, 
where  the  basal  difference  between  the  High- 
land and  the  Lowland  character  is  admirably 
drawn,  so  that  any  one  who  reads  it  will  un- 
derstand that  there  is  a  gulf  between,  say  a 
Yorkshire  man  and  a  Ross-shire  man.     They 
have    different  virtues    and    different   vices, 
their  blood  runs  at  a  different  heat,  and  their 
eyes  look  on  a  different  world.     Scott  rose  to 


142       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

his  height,  and  his  imagination  burned  with 
its  purest  flame,  when  he  describes  the  loyalty 
of  a  Highlander  to  his  chief.  "  I  was  only 
ganging  to  say,  my  lord,"  said  Evan  Mac- 
combich,  when  both  his  chief  and  he  had  been 
condemned  to  death  at  Carlisle  Assizes,  "  that 
if  your  excellent  honour  and  the  honourable 
Court  would  let  Vich  Ian  Vohr  go  free  just 
this  once,  and  let  him  gae  back  to  France,  and 
no  to  trouble  King  George's  government 
again,  that  ony  six  o'  the  very  best  of  his  clan 
will  be  willing  to  be  justified  in  his  stead;  and 
if  you'll  just  let  me  gae  down  to  Glennaquoich 
I'll  fetch  them  up  to  ye  mysell,  to  head  or 
hang,  and  you  may  begin  wi'  me  the  very  first 
man."  And  when  a  sort  of  laugh  was  heard 
in  the  Court,  Evan  looked  round  sternly. 
"  If  the  Saxon  gentlemen  are  laughing,"  he 
said,  "  because  a  poor  man  such  as  me,  thinks 
my  life  or  the  life  of  six  of  my  degree,  is 
worth  that  of  Vich  Ian  Vohr,  it's  like  enough 
they  may  be  very  right;  but  if  they  laugh  be- 
cause they  think  I  would  not  keep  my  word, 
and  come  back  to  redeem  him,  I  can  tell  them 
they  ken  neither  the  heart  of  a  Hielandman, 
nor  the  honour  of  a  gentleman."  He  disliked 
the  change  from  the  old  to  the  new,  when  the 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  143 

Treddles  supplant  the  Croftangrys,  and  also 
new-fangled  fashions,  and  would  rather  share 
the  feudal  and  homely  hospitality  of  Lord 
Huntingtower's  house  in  the  Fortunes  of 
Nigel,  than  go  with  his  profligate  son,  Lord 
Dalgarno,  to  the  French  eating-house  and  the 
gambling  table.  A  clear  distinction  is  drawn 
between  the  two  apprentices  in  the  same 
novel,  because  the  one  is  only  a  London 
trader's  son,  and  the  other  belongs  to  a  poor, 
but  gentle  Northern  house. 

Some  one  was  recently  denouncing  an  in- 
genuous woman  writer,  beloved  of  shop-girls, 
and  declaring  her  to  be  immoral,  and  his 
ground  was  that  she  was  fond  of  marrying 
the  shop-girl  to  the  lord,  or  some  other 
achievement  of  the  same  kind.  Scott  cer- 
tainly was  cleansed  from  all  immorality  of 
this  kind  (with  the  inevitable  solitary  excep- 
tion), and  no  woman  of  gentle  birth  marries 
beneath  her  in  Scott,  and  no  man  aspires  to  a 
woman  above  him.  They  marry  and  give  in 
marriage  each  within  his  own  degree.  It  is 
true  that  pretty  Peggy  Ramsay  in  the  For- 
tunes of  Nigel  does  become  Lady  Glenvarl- 
och,  but  this  exigency  of  the  story  is  relieved 
by  establishing  some  connection  between  the 


144       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

clockmaker's  daughter  and  the  great  Dal- 
housie  family.  If  Morton  in  Old  Mortality 
marries  Miss  Bellenden,  it  is  to  be  remem- 
bered he  is  an  officer's  son,  although  his  father 
was  a  mean  old  laird,  and  that  he  does  not 
marry  her  till  he  himself  is  a  distinguished 
officer.  The  line  between  gentlefolk  and  the 
rest  of  creation  is  kindly,  quietly,  but  con- 
stantly and  firmly  drawn. 

His  feudal  gospel  affords  a  more  engaging 
illustration  for  the  majority  of  people  when 
he  treats,  as  he  loves  to  do,  of  the  loyalty  of  a 
servant  to  his  master.  One  of  his  most  de- 
lightful minor  creations  is  the  "  Dougal 
cratur,"  the  type  of  dog-like  fidelity.  When 
he  thinks  it  wise  to  fling  up  his  post  as  turn- 
key in  Glasgow  gaol,  he  is  careful  to  leave 
the  doors  unlocked  so  that  his  chief  and  Bailie 
Nicol  Jarvie  may  not  be  caught  in  a  trap,  and 
when  the  Bailie  is  sore  put  to  it  in  the  public- 
house,  Dugald  jumped  up  from  the  floor  with 
his  native  sword  and  target  in  his  hand  to  do 
battle  for  the  discomfited  magistrate.  "  Her 
nainsell  has  eaten  the  town  pread  at  the  Cross 
o'  Glasgow,  and  py  her  troth  she'll  fight 
for  Bailie  Sharvie  at  the  Clachan  of  Aber- 
foyle  —  tat  will  she  e'en !  "     Macwheeble  was 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  145 

an  abject  and  a  worm  of  the  dust,  and  one  of 
the  drollest  scenes  in  Scott's  vein  of  humour 
is  the  worthy  man  wishing  to  take  charge  of 
Vich  Ian  Vohr's  purse  on  the  campaign  and  to 
lay  the  money  out  at  interest;  and  there's  no 
end  to  the  scheming  and  parsimony  of  the 
Bailie,  but  there  was  the  honest  feudal  heart 
hid  away  beneath  the  dirt  and  dross.  "  If  I 
fall,  Macwheeble,"  said  his  master,  Brad- 
wardine,  "  you  have  all  my  papers  and  know 
all  my  affairs;  be  just  to  Rose,"  whereat  the 
worthy  factor  set  up  a  lamentable  howl.  "  If 
that  doleful  day  should  come  while  Duncan 
Macwheeble  had  a  boddle  it  should  be  Miss 
Rose's.  He  would  scroll  for  a  plack  or  she 
kenn'd  what  it  was  to  want."  And  Scott  has 
fewer  more  cunning  scenes  than  Waverley's 
visit  to  Macwheeble  when  the  war  was  over, 
and  Macwheeble  was  suspiciously  watching 
every  visitor.  For  a  while  he  listened  to 
Waverley  with  anxiety  lest  he  had  come  to 
claim  assistance,  was  greatly  cheered  when  he 
heard  that  it  was  well  with  him,  and  when  he 
declared  his  intention  of  sharing  his  fortune 
with  Miss  Rose  Bradwardine,  the  Bailie  rose 
to  his  height.  "  He  flung  his  best  wig  out 
of  the  window  because  the  block  on  which  it 


146       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

was  placed  stood  in  the  way  of  his  career, 
chucked  his  cap  to  the  ceiling,  caught  it  as  it 
fell;  whistled  Tullochgorum ;  danced  a  High- 
land fling  with  inimitable  grace  and  agility, 
and  then  threw  himself  exhausted  into  a  chair 
exclaiming,  "Lady  Wauverleyl  —  ten  thou- 
sand a  year,  the  least  penny  1  Lord  preserve 
my  poor  understanding."  And  after  making 
a  hurried  note  on  a  sheet  of  paper,  "  a  sma' 
minute  to  prevent  parties  fra  resiling,"  he 
broke  forth  again.  "  Lady  Wauverley,  ten 
thousand  a  year!  Lord  be  gude  unto  me 
.  .  .  it  dings  Balmawhapple  out  and  out, 
a  year's  rent  worth  of  Balmawhapple,  fee  and 
life  rent,  Lord  make  us  thankful."  Brad- 
wardine  himself  lies  concealed  on  his  own  es- 
tate and  not  a  tenant  will  betray  him,  and  he 
often  finds  "  bits  of  things  in  my  way  that  the 
poor  bodies,  God  help  them,  put  there  be- 
cause they  think  they  may  be  useful  to  me." 
Richie  Moniplies  is  a  preaching  and  provok- 
ing fool  of  a  man-servant,  but  he  is  unflinch- 
ingly loyal  to  Nigel,  and  therefore  Scott  gives 
him  a  knighthood  before  he  has  done  with 
him.  Edie  Ochiltree,  the  beggar  man,  when 
there  is  a  threatening  of  invasion,  lends  a  hand 
for  the  defence  of  the  land  he  loves,  and 
proves  himself  a  dog  of  the  old  Scots  breed  — > 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  147 

a  fighting  terrier  —  and  not  the  shiftless, 
treacherous,  cowardly  tramp  of  our  highways. 
It  is  a  mistake  to  suppose  that  any  novelist 
can  simply  lift  living  persons  into  his  pages. 
This  would  be  a  violation  of  the  technique  of 
his  art,  and  were  the  same  thing  as  if  one 
pasted  a  photograph  into  the  middle  of  a  pic- 
ture. The  characters  in  real  fiction  have  been 
his  own  creation,  but  his  imagination  has  been 
fed  with  the  material  of  life.  Scott  lived 
among  the  people  of  his  novels  before  they 
took  service  with  him  in  literature.  If  he 
deals  very  kindly  with  faithful  Caleb  Balder- 
stone  it  was  because  his  own  household  were 
so  faithful  to  him.  He  took  a  fancy  to  a 
poacher  that  was  brought  before  him  for  jus- 
tice and  passed  him  into  his  own  service,  and 
Purdie  was  his  loyal  henchman  hencefor- 
ward. When  evil  days  befell  Scott  and  he 
had  to  reduce  his  establishment,  Pepe  Mathie- 
son,  who  used  to  be  the  coachman,  was  willing 
to  be  the  ploughman,  and  Scott  was  most 
grateful  for  this  fealty.  "  I  cannot  forget," 
says  Lockhart,  "  how  his  eyes  sparkled  when 
he  first  pointed  out  to  me  Peter  Mathieson 
guiding  the  plough  on  the  Haugh.  *  Egad,' 
he  said,  '  old  Pepe  and  old  Pepe's  whistling 
at  his  darg.    The  honest  fellow  said  a  yoking 


148       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

in  a  deep  field  would  do  baith  him  and  the 
blackies  good.  If  things  get  round  with  me, 
easy  shall  be  Pepe's  cushion."  One  of  the 
trials  of  Scott's  life  was  the  death  of  Thomas 
Purdie,  the  ex-poacher  and  trusty  servitor. 
"  I  have  lost,"  Scott  writes,  "  my  old  and 
faithful  servant,  and  am  so  much  shocked  that 
I  really  wish  to  be  quit  of  the  country  and  safe 
in  town.  I  have  this  day  laid  him  in  the 
grave."  This  was  the  inscription  on  Purdie's 
tomb  — 

IN  GRATEFUL  REMEMBRANCE 

OF 

THE  FAITHFUL 

AND  ATTACHED  SERVICES 

OF 

TWENTY-TWO  YEARS, 

AND  IN  SORROW 

FOR  THE   LOSS  OF   A   HUMBLB 

BUT  SINCERE  FRIEND, 

THIS  STONE  WAS  ERECTED 

BY 

Sir  WALTER  SCOTT,  Bart., 
OF  Abbotsford. 

"  Thou  hast  been  faithful 
Over  a  few  things, 
I  will  make  thee  ruler 
Over  many  things." 


WAVERLY  NOVELS  149 

This  is  the  heart  of  the  Waverley  Novels, 
and  Scott's  sweetest  note. 

Thomson,  the  son  of  the  minister  of  Melrose, 
who  became  tutor  at  Abbotsford,  won  Scott's 
heart  because  he  lost  his  leg  in  an  encounter  of 
his  boyhood  and  refused  to  betray  the  name  of 
the  companion  that  had  occasioned  the  mis- 
hap. "  In  the  Dominie,  like  myself,  accident 
has  spoiled  a  capital  life-guardsman,  and  so 
many  were  his  eccentricities,  so  rich  his  learn- 
ing, and  so  sound  his  principles,  that  he  sat 
for  good  Dominie  Sampson."  It  may  have 
struck  the  reader  of  the  Fair  Maid  of  Perth 
that  the  physical  timidity  of  Conachar,  the 
young  Highland  chief,  and  the  disgrace  of 
his  flight  from  the  battle  on  the  North  Inch 
of  Perth,  where  his  henchmen  had  died  so 
bravely  for  him,  was  written  with  a  certain 
sympathy  of  feeling.  That  passage  in  which 
one  is  made  to  pity  the  poor  lad  was  Scott's 
atonement  for  perhaps  the  one  cruel  deed  of 
his  life,  his  contemptuous  anger  against  a 
brother  who  had  refused  to  fight  a  duel  (he 
was  willing  to  fight  one  in  old  age  himself). 
A  lover  of  all  dumb  animals,  he  pays  his  trib- 
ute to  Maida  and  his  other  favourite  dogs  in 
iBevis,  the  noble  hound  of  Woodstock,  and 


150         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

many  another  friendly  fellow,  whom  his  hand 
touches  gently  in  fiction.  When  the  Baron 
of  Bradwardine  comes  down  to  Janet's  cottage 
and  Waverley  and  he  have  their  supper  to- 
gether, Ban  and  Buscar  have  also  their  share. 
They  play  their  loyal  part,  too,  and  Scott  is 
still  teaching  his  lesson  of  fidelity  as  much  as 
when  he  wrote  the  epitaph  on  old  Maida  — 

"  Beneath  the  sculptured  form,  which  late  you  wore, 
Sleep  soundly,  Maida,  at  your  master's  door." 

When  the  Antiquary  came  forward  at  the 
young  fisherman's  funeral  and  said  that,  as 
landlord  to  the  deceased,  he  would  carry  his 
head  to  the  grave,  it  was  Scott's  own  heart 
speaking,  and  old  Alison  Breck,  among  the 
fish-women,  swore  almost  aloud,  funeral 
though  it  was.  "  His  honour  Monkbarns 
should  never  want  sax  warp  of  oysters  in  the 
season  (of  which  fish  he  was  understood  to  be 
fond)  if  she  should  gang  to  sea  and  dredge 
for  them  herself,  in  the  foulest  wind  that  ever 
blew."  It  was  when  staying  with  a  friend  at 
Loch  Lomond  that  he  bethought  himself  of 
Rob  Roy  and  laid  out  the  scenery  in  his  mind, 
and  among  his  acquaintances  he  found  the  de- 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  151 

lightful  Antiquary.  The  Epic  of  Jeanie 
Deans  he  took  from  actual  life,  and  even  the 
smugglers'  secret  cellars  in  Redgauntlet  he 
had  found  at  Berwick.  The  Covenanters  of 
a  later  generation  he  had  seen  and  not  particu- 
larly loved,  and  the  old  Scots  gossips  who 
talk  in  the  post-office  scene  —  one  of  the 
most  successful  interiors  of  Scott  —  he  had 
met  in  many  a  cottage.  He  is  most  convin- 
cing when  he  is  dealing  with  Scots  life;  young 
Waverley,  the  English  squire,  is  a  shadow  be- 
side the  Antiquary,  and  Scott  himself  de- 
scribes him  as  a  sneaking  piece  of  imbecility, 
and  declared  his  conviction  that  "  if  he  had 
married  Flora  M'lvor  she  would  have  set 
him  up  upon  the  chimneypiece."  The  Eng- 
lish peasant  in  Scott's  novels  is  a  wooden 
figure  beside  Cuddie  Headrigg,  and  the  Lon- 
don cashier  a  poor  ghost  in  the  presence  of 
Bailie  Nicol  Jarvie.  If  his  Scots  lairds,  and 
Scots  peasants,  and  Scots  women  of  the  work- 
ing class  are  not  real,  and  do  not  carry  them- 
selves as  flesh  and  blood,  then  there  is  no  re- 
ality in  fiction. 

With  all  his  inherent  nobility  of  soul  and 
personal  elevation  above  everything  mean, 
Scott  had  a  thorough  appreciation  of  what 


152        BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

has  been  called,  and  no  word  so  accurately 
describes  it,  the  "  pawkiness "  of  Scots  char- 
acter, which  is  shared  in  some  degree  by  all 
classes  from  ploughmen  to  ecclesiastics,  and 
of  which  a  Bailie  is  often  the  perfect  imper- 
sonation. And  this  characteristic  quality  of 
the  Scots  people  has  been  immortalised  in  one 
of  Scott's  most  felicitous  passages,  when  Niel 
Blane  gives  directions  to  his  daughter  how  to 
manage  the  public-house  in  the  trying  days 
of  Claverhouse  and  the  Covenanters.  "  Jenny, 
this  is  the  first  day  that  ye  are  to  take 
the  place  of  your  worthy  mother  in  attending 
to  the  public;  a  douce  woman  she  was,  civil 
to  the  customers,  and  had  a  good  name  wi' 
Whig  and  Tory,  baith  up  the  street  and  doun 
the  street.  It  will  be  hard  for  you  to  fill 
her  place,  especially  on  sic  a  thrang  day  as 
this;  but  Heaven's  will  maun  be  obeyed. 
Jenny,  whatever  Milnwood  ca's  for,  be  sure 
he  maun  hae't,  for  he's  the  captain  o'  the 
Popinjay,  and  auld  customs  maun  be  sup- 
ported; if  he  canna  pay  the  lawing  himsell,  as 
I  ken  he's  keepit  unco  short  by  the  head,  I'll 
find  a  way  to  shame  it  out  o'  his  uncle. —  The 
curate  is  playing  at  dice  wi'  Cornet  Grahame. 
QBe  eident  and  civil  to  them  baith  —  clergy 


WAVERtEY  NOVELS         153 

and  captains  can  gie  an  unco  deal  o'  fash  in 
thae  times,  where  they  take  an  ill-will. —  The 
dragoons  will  be  crying  for  ale,  and  they 
wunna  want  it,  and  maunna  want  it  —  they  are 
unruly  chiels,  but  they  pay  ane  some  gate  or 
other.  I  gat  the  humle-cow,  that's  the  best 
in  the  byre,  frae  black  Frank  Inglis  and 
Sergeant  Bothwell  for  ten  pund  Scots,  and 
they  drank  out  the  price  at  ae  downsitting. 
.  .  .  Whist!  ye  silly  tawpie,  we  have 
naething  to  do  how  they  come  by  the  bestial 
they  sell — -be  that  atween  them  and  their 
consciences. —  Aweel. —  Take  notice,  Jenny, 
of  that  dour,  stour-looking  carle  that  sits  by 
the  cheek  o'  the  ingle,  and  turns  his  back  on 
a'  men.  He  looks  like  one  o'  the  hill  folk, 
for  I  saw  him  start  a  wee  when  he  saw  the 
redcoats,  and  I  jalouse  he  wad  hae  liked  to 
hae  ridden  by,  but  his  horse  (it's  a  good  geld- 
ing) was  ower  sair  travailed;  he  behoved  to 
stop  whether  he  wad  or  no.  Serve  him  can- 
nily,  Jenny,  and  wi'  little  din,  and  dinna 
bring  the  sodgers  on  him  by  speering  ony 
questions  at  him;  but  let  him  no  hae  a  room 
to  himsell,  they  wad  say  ye  were  hiding  him. 
' —  For  yoursell,  Jenny,  ye'U  be  civil  to  a'  the 
folk,  and  take  nae  heed  o'  ony  nonsense  and 


154        BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

daffing  the  young  lads  may  say  t'ye.  Folk  in 
the  hostler  line  maun  put  up  wi'  muckle. 
Your  mither,  rest  her  saul,  could  put  up  wi'  as 
muckle  as  maist  women  —  but  off  hands  is 
fair  play;  and  if  onybody  be  uncivil  ye  may 
gie  me  a  cry. —  Aweel,  when  the  malt  begins 
to  get  aboon  the  meal,  they'll  begin  to  speak 
about  government  in  kirk  and  state,  and  then, 
Jenny,  they  are  like  to  quarrel  —  let  them  be 
doing  —  anger's  a  drouthy  passion,  and  the 
mair  they  dispute,  the  mair  ale  they'll  drink; 
but  ye  were  best  serve  them  wi'  a  pint  o'  the 
sma'  browst,  it  will  heat  them  less,  and  they'll 
never  ken  the  difference." 

Scott's  religious  position  has  been,  as  was 
inevitable,  the  subject  of  keen  controversy,  for 
Scotland  has  ever  been  a  land  of  theological 
debate,  and  is  to-day  living  up  with  spirit  to 
her  ancient  character.  When  Sir  Walter 
opened  the  novel  of  Old  Mortality  on  the  5th 
of  May  1679,  and  plunged  into  the  life  of  that 
day  in  the  West  of  Scotland,  he  took  his  cour- 
age in  both  his  hands,  for  he  chose  the  period 
and  the  scene  of  the  hottest  conflict  in  Scots 
history.  Owing  partly  to  the  wildness  of  the 
scenery  and  partly  to  the  intensity  of  the  peo- 
ple, the  history  of  Scotland  has  been  one  long 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  155 

romance,  and  from  the  Reformation,  religion 
was  the  original  cause  and  burning  fire  of 
every  controversy.  No  one  can  understand 
Scots  history  without  fixing  in  his  mind  that 
religion  has  played  the  chief  part  in  the  mak- 
ing of  Scots  life,  and  that  the  Scots  have  been 
ready  to  argue  and  to  fight,  not  only  about  the 
great  principles  which  have  divided,  say  the 
Roman  from  the  Protestant  faith,  but  also 
about  the  jots  and  tittles  of  their  creed.  Fine 
scruples  have  created  parties  within  the  Scots 
Kirk  which  are  almost  innumerable,  and 
which  certainly  are  now  unintelligible  to  the 
modern  mind.  Sir  Walter  has  crystallised 
the  perfervidum  ingenium  of  the  Scots  folk 
in  this  book,  and  staged  not  the  politics  only 
but  the  theology  of  Scotland.  There  were 
the  Cavaliers  under  Claverhouse  hunting  the 
Presbyterians,  who  were  hiding  on  the  moors, 
and  meeting  in  Conventicles  for  worship,  and 
the  Covenanters  growing  ever  more  bitter  and 
determined  under  this  persecution,  till  at  last 
they  were  ready  to  renounce  allegiance  to  the 
King,  as  well  as  to  denounce  the  Bishops,  and 
there  were  the  less  extreme  Presbyterians  who 
thought  that  their  brethren  had  gone  too  far, 
and  endeavoured  to  reconcile  their  own  reli- 


156         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

gious  principles  with  loyalty  to  government. 
This  was  the  situation  of  Old  Mortality,  and 
these  the  feelings  which  moved  its  characters. 
Scott's  insight  and  fairness  must  be  judged  by 
his  studies  of  Claverhouse  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  Presbyterian  ministers  on  the  other, 
and  it  has  been  difficult  to  satisfy  every  per- 
son about  Claverhouse.  Macaulay,  who  is 
neither  a  Covenanter  nor  an  advocate  of  their 
particular  case,  asserts  that  Claverhouse 
goaded  the  peasantry  of  the  Western  Low- 
lands into  madness,  and  murdered  a  pious 
Covenanter  called  Brown  before  his  wife's 
eyes,  while  in  Napier's  Memoirs  of  Dundee 
Grahame  is  represented  as  a  patriotic  Scots- 
man as  well  as  a  gallant  soldier,  and  this  was 
also  the  portrait  drawn  by  another  Jacobite 
man  of  letters,  Charles  Kirkpatrick  Sharpe. 
"  Bloody  Claverhouse  "  was  the  Covenanting 
nickname,  and  "  Bonnie  Dundee "  was  the 
Cavalier  description  of  the  same  man,  and  it 
is  only  less  dangerous  to  hold  the  scales  of 
justice  in  the  life  of  Claverhouse  than  in  that 
of  Queen  Mary.  It  was  to  his  credit  that  he 
was  on  bad  terms  with  the  drunken  politicians 
of  the  day,  and  that  he  remained  to  the  end  of 
his  career  an  unselfish  loyalist,  doing  all  that 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS         157 

in  him  lay  for  the  Stuart  family,  with  very 
little  thanks  from  either  them  or  their  ad- 
visers, and  that  he  died  at  the  battle  of  Kil- 
liecrankie  fighting  for  a  lost  cause.  It  was 
not  the  least  of  his  exploits  that  he  won 
the  heart  of  Lady  Jean  Cochrane,  whose 
mother  was  an  extreme  Covenanter;  but  there 
seems  little  doubt  that  behind  a  fair  face  and 
graceful  manner  he  hid  a  determined  and  un- 
swerving purpose,  that  to  his  friends  he  was 
tender  and  true,  and  to  the  enemies  of  his 
cause  absolutely  murderous,  and  that  in  spite 
of  the  apologies  of  his  biographer,  Napier, 
and  the  glamour  cast  round  him  in  Lays  of  the 
Scottish  Cavaliers,  he  treated  the  Covenanters 
with  great  cruelty  and  did  not  shrink  from 
military  murders.  Upon  the  whole  I  am  in- 
clined to  think  that  the  study  of  Grahame  in 
Old  Mortality,  although  it  has  been  so  se- 
verely criticised  in  Covenanting  quarters,  is 
not  far  from  the  truth,  for  full  justice  is  done 
to  his  personal  attractiveness  and  disinterested 
loyalty,  while  his  disregard  of  popular  rights 
and  his  indifference  to  suffering  are  clearly 
represented. 

Whether  Scott  has  rendered  equal  justice  to 
the  other  side  is  another  question,  and  per- 


158        BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

haps  he  ought  not  to  have  prejudiced  the  case 
by  caricaturing  the  names  of  the  Covenanting 
ministers.  One  is  inclined  beforehand  to  laugh 
at  clergymen  who  are  called  Poundtext  or  Ket- 
tledrummle,  or  Habakkuk  Mucklewrath. 
The  reader  must,  however,  remember  that  the 
names  are  only  the  license  of  a  novelist,  and 
that  the  Presbyterian  minister  did  not  pound 
his  text  any  more  clumsily,  and  that  he  was 
not  any  more  a  kettledrum  in  the  matter  of 
noise  than  the  Episcopalian  curate  of  the  day. 
One  cannot  tell  who  sat  for  Poundtext,  but 
for  Kettledrummle  and  Mucklewrath  one  sus- 
pects that  Scott  depended  upon  the  lives  of 
Peden  and  Cameron,  as  told  with  remarkable 
felicity  of  style  by  Patrick  Walker,  in  the 
book  called  Biographia  Presbyteriana.  Pat- 
rick Walker  could  tell  a  story  with  engaging 
vigour,  and  was  a  great  favourite  with  Rob- 
ert Louis  Stevenson,  who,  in  his  Letters,  vol.  ii. 
p.  312,  says:  "  I  have  lately  been  returning  to 
my  wallowing  in  the  mire.  When  I  was  a 
child,  and  indeed  until  I  was  nearly  a  man,  I 
consistently  read  Covenanting  books.  Now 
that  I  am  a  grey-beard  —  or  would  be  if  I 
could  raise  the  beard  —  I  have  returned,  and 
for  weeks  back  have  read  little  else  but  Wod- 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  159 

row,  Walker,  Shields,  &c."  McBriar,  whom 
Scott  treats  with  more  respect,  is  almost  cer- 
tainly Hugh  McKail,  a  young  clergyman  of 
delicate  constitution  and  beautiful  character, 
who  threw  himself  into  the  Covenanting 
cause,  and  was  involved  in  the  "  Pentland 
Rising."  He  was  taken  prisoner  and  put  to 
death  in  Edinburgh  in  the  twenty-sixth  year 
of  his  age.  During  his  trial  he  was  tortured 
in  the  "  boots,"  and  Scott  has  used  the  scene 
in  Old  Mortality.  McKail  was  a  high-spir- 
ited enthusiast,  and  his  last  words  on  the  scaf- 
fold were :  "  I  ascend  to  my  Father  and  your 
Father,  to  my  God  and  your  God  —  to  my 
King  and  your  King,  to  the  blessed  Apostles 
and  Martyrs,  and  to  the  city  of  the  living 
God,  the  Heavenly  Jerusalem,  to  an  innumer- 
able company  of  Angels,  to  the  general  as- 
sembly of  the  first-born,  to  God  the  Judge  of 
all,  to  the  spirits  of  just  men  made  perfect, 
and  to  Jesus  the  mediator  of  the  new  cove- 
nant; and  I  bid  you  all  farewell,  for  God  will 
be  more  comfortable  to  you  than  I  could  be, 
and  He  will  be  now  more  refreshing  to  me 
than  you  could  be.  Farewell,  farewell  in 
the  Lord!" 
From  the  moderate  Presbyterian  clergy,  so 


160       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

poorly  represented  by  Poundtext,  Scott  might 
have  taken  men  like  Robert  Douglas,  of  whom 
it  was  written :  "  He  was  a  great  state 
preacher,  one  of  the  greatest  of  that  age  in 
Scotland,  for  he  feared  no  man  to  declare  the 
mind  of  God  to  him,  yet  very  accessible  and 
easy  to  be  conversed  with."  Or  Lawrence 
Charteris,  who  was  described  by  Bishop  Bur- 
net as  "  a  perfect  friend  and  a  most  sublime 
Christian.  He  did  not  talk  of  the  defects  of 
his  kind  like  an  angry  reformer,  but  like  a 
man  full  of  a  deep  but  humble  sense  of  them." 
He  used  to  say  the  defection  among  them  has 
been  "  from  the  temper  and  conversation 
which  the  Gospel  requires  of  us."  Above  all 
he  could  have  chosen  Leighton,  who  was  first 
of  all  a  Presbyterian  minister  and  then  a 
Bishop,  but  above  all  a  Christian;  and  Car- 
stairs,  who  was  persecuted  before  the  Refor- 
mation, and  after  the  Reformation  became  the 
most  powerful  man  in  Scotland,  who  showed 
the  greatest  kindness  to  the  party  that  had 
persecuted  him,  and  was  beyond  question  the 
ablest  clergyman  of  his  day.  It  is  always  a 
misfortune,  and  one  may  find  a  contemporary 
illustration,  when  any  body  of  men  are  driven 
into  extreme  views  and  desperate  actions,  for 
they  become  either  absurd  or  fanatical,  and 


WAVEHLEY  NOVELS       161 

the  real  conscience  and  courage  of  the  Cove- 
nanters have  been  much  disfigured  by  a  want 
of  charity  in  their  utterances  and  common 
sense  in  their  policy.  But  it  is  well  to  re- 
member that  they  were  not  all  Kettle- 
drummles,  and  Scott  declares  in  a  note  to  Old 
Mortality,  that  if  he  had  to  rewrite  the  tale 
he  would  give  the  Moderate  Party  a  better 
representative  than  Peter  Poundtext,  and  even 
the  severest  critic  of  Scott  from  the  Covenant- 
ing side  must  admit  that  in  Jeanie  Deans 
he  drew  a  perfect  type  of  humble  Scots 
piety. 

Is  it  wonderful  that  the  extreme  wing  of 
Scots  religion,  which  has  not  always  been  in 
profound  sympathy  with  literature,  has  found 
some  difficulty  in  accepting  Scott  as  an 
interpreter  of  our  nation,  when  Thomas  Car- 
lyle,  who  was  by  instinct  a  man  of  letters,  has 
not  dealt  so  generously  with  his  distinguished 
fellow-countryman  as  those  who  love  both 
men  could  desire.  Among  certain  admirable 
doctrines  of  the  Roman  faith  there  is  one 
called  "  invincible  ignorance  "  which  ought  to 
be  allowed  greater  play  in  every  controversy, 
theological  or  political,  and  not  least  in  racial 
misunderstandings.  By  our  heredity  and  en- 
vironment, by  the  books  we  have  read  and  the 


162       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

men  who  have  taught  us,  by  the  blood  in  our 
veins  and  the  people  among  whom  we  have 
lived,  we  are  apt  to  be  so  impressed  and  so 
biassed  as  to  be  blinded  to  the  truth  of  a  creed 
which  is  not  ours,  and  the  excellence  of  men 
who  are  of  another  type.  It  were  a  counsel 
of  perfection  to  ask  from  a  Puritan  justice  to 
Charles  I.  and  Oliver  Cromwell,  and  al- 
though it  was  a  fine  achievement  of  Erasmus 
to  appreciate  at  their  value  both  Luther  and 
Pope  Leo  X.,  that  humanist  is  a  rare  figure 
in  history,  and  I  am  sorry  to  say  not  a  force 
in  affairs.  People  full  of  the  strong  wine  of 
Scots  controversy  are  apt  to  speak  as  if  there 
has  been  only  one  Scotland ;  the  Scotland  cre- 
ated by  John  Knox  and  the  ministers  of  the 
Kirk,  by  the  theology  of  Calvin  and  the  demo- 
cratic education  of  the  parish  school,  and  rep- 
resented admirably  and  successfully  by  that 
middle  class  which  has  supplied  the  elders  to 
the  Kirk  and  the  traders  to  foreign  parts,  and 
up  to  this  time  has  made  Scotland  intelligent 
and  prosperous.  They  forget  that  there  has 
been  always  another  Scotland  since  the  days 
of  Queen  Mary,  of  Catholics,  Episcopalians, 
Jacobites,  and  Moderate  Kirkmen,  like  that 
excellent  man  of  sincerity  and  courtesy,  who 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  163 

ended  a  note  to  John  Knox,  "  Farewell  in 
Christ,  and  endeavour  to  let  truth  prevail  and 
not  the  man,"  and  Archbishop  Leighton  who 
was  weary  of  wrangling,  and  Carstairs  who 
held  the  scales  level  between  both  sides,  and 
the  literary  men  who,  at  the  close  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  made  Edinburgh  glorious 
through  the  world.  Unto  this  Scotland  be- 
longed for  the  most  part  the  soldiers,  the  great 
lawyers,  poets,  and  scholars,  and  of  this  line 
Scott  had  come.  He  was  a  Cavalier  whose 
heart  was  with  Prince  Charles,  though  his 
reason  was  with  King  George,  who  could  ap- 
preciate the  courage  of  the  Covenanters,  but 
whose  own  attitude  would  have  been  that  of 
Young  Morton  in  Old  Mortality,  Scott  in 
his  geniality  and  charity,  his  sympathies  with 
the  virtues  of  a  chivalrous  past,  and  his  in- 
stinctive dislike  of  religious  extremity,  was  a 
Moderate,  and  has  behind  him  a  minority, 
perhaps,  of  the  Scots  people,  but  a  minority 
commanding  respect  for  its  appreciation  of  a 
storied  past,  its  devotion  to  Art  and  Letters, 
its  love  of  peace  and  its  principle  of  charity. 
It  is  to  the  credit  of  Sir  Walter  that  he,  the 
descendant  of  those  border  raiders,  has  been 
as  comprehensive  and  as  tolerant. 


164        BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

Carlyle,  on  the  other  hand,  whatever  may 
have  been  his  former  creed  or  his  local  sur- 
roundings, was  all  his  days  a  Calvinist  and  a 
democrat,  with  the  narrowness  and  sincerity, 
the  strength  and  intolerance  of  the  peasant 
class  from  which  he  sprung.  It  is  natural  for 
Carlyle  to  ridicule  Sir  Walter's  desire  to  es- 
tablish a  county  family,  and  one  recognises 
that  the  ambitions  of  Abbotsford  and  Eccle- 
fechan  were  hopelessly  at  variance,  but  as  one 
who  received  his  first  literary  inspiration  from 
Carlyle's  address  to  the  students  of  Edinburgh 
University,  and  who  has  felt  the  iron  of  Car- 
lyle's virile  gospel  pass  as  a  tonic  into  his 
blood,  I  cannot  but  regret  that  Carlyle  in  his 
well-known  essay  did  such  poor  justice  to 
Scott  and  the  Waverley  Novels.  When  he 
speaks  of  him  as  writing  daily  "  with  the 
ardour  of  a  steam-engine,  that  he  might  make 
fifteen  thousand  a  year  and  buy  upholstery 
with  it,"  and  pronounces  that  "  his  work  is 
not  profitable  for  doctrine  or  reproof  or  edi- 
fication or  building  up  or  elevating  in  any 
shape,"  one  knows  that  he  has  seen  Scott  in 
a  glass  darkly,  and  that  because  he  had  not 
come  with  open  face.  When  he  enlarges 
upon  Scott  as  one  of  the  healthiest  of  men, 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  165 

and  allows  with  condescension  that  amuse- 
ment in  the  way  of  reading  can  go  no  further 
than  his  tales,  one  wishes  that  Carlyle  had 
left  Scott  alone  and  confined  himself  to  Burns, 
whom  he  understood  from  the  heart  out,  for 
they  were  by  heredity  of  the  same  breed. 
Compare  Lockhart's  Scott;  one  of  the  most 
wholesome  biographies  in  our  literature,  and 
the  Life  of  Carlyle.  Carlyle  complains  that 
Scott's  biography  had  run  to  seven  volumes, 
but  his  in  one  shape  or  other  has  run  to 
several  volumes  more,  and  no  one  can  be 
sure  when  it  will  be  finally  concluded,  and 
his  grave  be  left  in  peace.  Carlyle  is  in 
serious  doubt  whether  Scott  was  a  great 
man,  and  while  he  admits  he  was  a  demi- 
god among  the  circulating  heroes  of  the 
library,  he  sees  no  likelihood  of  a  place  for 
him  among  the  great  writers  of  all  ages. 
Well,  the  books  stand  together  upon  the 
shelf  of  every  student  of  literature  and  Scots 
history;  we  can  form  our  own  judgment 
of  greatness.  It  is  a  means  of  grace  to  read 
Scott's  life,  in  which,  if  nothing  is  set  down 
in  malice,  nothing  is  extenuated,  for  his  stain- 
less purity  in  which  there  was  no  touch  of  au- 
sterity, his  winsome  good  nature  which  never 


166       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

seemed  to  fail,  his  kindliness  to  every  person 
and  creature  that  came  into  contact  with  him, 
his  too  generous  help  to  second-rate  writers 
and  rash  publishers,  his  generous  forgiveness 
of  the  wrongs  which  he  suffered  in  business 
affairs,  his  heroic  endurance  of  the  cruellest 
pain,  his  early  romantic  attachment  which 
was  the  shadow  on  his  life,  his  chivalrous  serv- 
ice of  his  wife  who  was  not  his  real  love,  his 
courage  in  the  great  crash  of  his  affairs,  his 
persistent  toil  to  pay  other  men's  debts,  and 
his  gentle,  believing  death,  bring  us  into  an 
atmosphere  in  which  it  is  good  to  live.  No 
woman  had  ever  cause  to  complain  of  Scott's 
rudeness,  no  man  heard  him  whine  about  his 
illnesses,  no  fellow-writer  was  contemptuously 
treated  by  him,  no  man  was  afraid  to  speak  to 
him.  He  had  no  affectations,  either  in  style 
or  manner;  he  had  neither  grudges  nor  jeal- 
ousies; every  one  loved  him  —  his  wife,  his 
children,  his  friends,  his  printers,  his  serv- 
ants, his  dogs.  "  Scott,"  says  Lord  Tenny- 
son, "  is  the  most  chivalrous  literary  figure  of 
this  century,  and  the  author  with  the  finest 
range  since  Shakespeare."  His  was  the  great- 
ness of  faith  and  charity,  and  one  may  hold 
with  reason  that  Scotland  has  never  produced 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS         167 

a  finer  instance  of  practical  and  persuasive 
religion. 

The  subtle  quality  of  a  man's  character 
passes  into  his  work  and  becomes  its  preserving 
salt,  but  a  great  writer  must  submit  his  work 
to  the  arbitrament,  not  of  the  popularity  of  his 
day,  but  of  the  criticism  which  is  above  every 
day.  There  are  books  which  catch  the  ear  of 
the  people  and  pass  away  having  served  their 
purpose,  there  are  books  which  remain  and 
they  are  the  classics.  "  The  last  discovery  of 
modern  culture,"  a  competent  writer  says,  "  is 
that  Scott's  prose  is  commonplace.  The 
young  men  at  our  universities  are  too  critical 
to  care  for  his  artless  sentences  and  flowing 
descriptions.  As  boys  love  lollipops,  so  these 
juvenile  fops  love  to  roll  phrases  under  the 
tongue,  as  if  phrases  in  themselves  had  any 
value  apart  from  thoughts,  feelings,  great  con- 
ceptions of  human  sympathy."  From  the  cir- 
culars of  publishers  I  learn  that  new  editions 
of  Scott  are  ever  appearing,  but  from  private 
observation  I  do  not  find  the  younger  genera- 
tion is  reading  Scott,  and  without  any  disre- 
spect to  the  literary  craftsmen  of  the  day,  this 
seems  to  me  a  calamity.  It  reminds  me  of 
Ruskin's  saying,  about  wondering,  not  how 


168         BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

much  people  suffer,  but  how  much  they  lose. 
It  may  be  that  Scott  has  indulged  too  much  in 
introductions,  and  has  dared  to  add  notes 
which  are  full  of  instruction,  but  which,  on 
that  account,  this  generation  does  not  desire. 
Or  it  may  be  that  he  has  not  the  trick  of  sen- 
sational plot,  and  did  not  strike  upon  the  in- 
vention of  the  detective  story.  There  is,  how- 
ever, good  ground  for  believing  that  his  hold 
is  permanent,  and  that  in  the  end  his  vogue 
will  be  universal.  When  estimating  Scott  we 
must  remind  ourselves  what  he  essayed  to  do, 
and  his  was  that  which  is  the  first  and  will  be 
the  last  form  of  literature.  When  the  first 
half-dozen  humans  gathered  in  a  cave  one 
told  how  he  had  killed  some  monstrous  beast, 
and  that  was  the  beginning  of  letters ;  when  the 
last  half-dozen  huddle  together  on  the  cold 
earth  some  one  will  tell  of  his  battle  with  a 
seal,  and  that  will  be  the  end  of  letters.  Litera- 
ture began  with  a  story,  and  nothing  so  holds 
the  human  mind,  and  the  genius  of  Sir  Wal- 
ter Scott  was  the  genius  of  the  story.  Let  us 
grant  that  his  style  was  not  "  precious,"  let  us 
even  grant  that  it  was  sometimes  redundant,  if 
you  please  slipshod,  he  could  afford  even  if  he 
chose  to  be  ungrammatical.     His  was  the  easy 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  169 

undress  of  one  whose  position  was  assured  and 
who  was  indifferent  to  little  conventionalities. 
Between  the  books  of  precocious  moderns  and 
the  Waverley  Novels  there  is  the  same  differ- 
ence as  between  the  trim  lawn  and  the  neat 
little  beds  of  a  villa  garden,  and  the  mountain 
side  with  the  swelling  waves  of  purple  heather 
and  the  emerald  green  between.  It  partakes 
of  a  debating  society  to  inquire  which  is  his 
greatest  book,  but  I  suppose  his  mightiest 
three  are  Old  Mortality,  the  Antiquary,  and 
the  Heart  of  Midlothian.  With  those  three 
and  his  Shakespeare  a  man  might  be  content. 
For  this  is  the  large  and  wealthy  place  of  lit- 
erature, where  you  breathe  the  air  of  Homer 
and  of  Virgil,  of  Dante  and  Milton.  And 
for  a  single  passage  of  passion  and  pathos  I 
can  only  remember  one  other  from  Thackeray 
to  be  compared  with  the  plea  which  Jeanie 
Deans  made  with  the  Queen  for  her  sister^s 
life:— 

"  O,  madam,  if  ever  ye  kend  what  it  was 
to  sorrow  for  and  with  a  sinning  and  a  suffer- 
ing creature,  whose  mind  is  sae  tossed  that  she 
can  be  neither  ca'd  fit  to  live  or  die,  have 
some  compassion  on  our  misery!  Save  an 
honest  house  from  dishonour,  and  an  unhappy 


170        BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

girl,  not  eighteen  years  of  age,  from  an  early 
and  dreadful  death!  Alas  I  it  is  not  when 
we  sleep  soft  and  wake  merrily  ourselves  that 
we  think  on  other  people's  sufferings.  Our 
hearts  are  waxed  light  within  us  then,  and  we 
are  for  righting  our  ain  wrangs  and  fighting 
our  ain  battles.  But  when  the  hour  of  trouble 
comes  to  the  mind  or  to  the  body  —  and  sel- 
dom may  it  visit  your  leddyship  —  and  when 
the  hour  of  death  comes,  that  comes  to  high 
and  low  — •  lang  and  late  may  it  be  yours  — 
O,  my  leddy,  then  it  isna  what  we  hae  dune 
for  oursels,  but  what  we  hae  dune  for  others, 
that  we  think  on  maist  pleasantly.  And  the 
thought  that  ye  hae  intervened  to  spare  the 
puir  thing's  life  will  be  sweeter  in  that  hour, 
come  when  it  may,  than  if  a  word  of  your 
mouth  could  hang  the  haill  Porteous  mob  at 
the  tail  of  ae  tow."  * 

And  yet,  and  I  quote  a  modern:  "This 
glorious  poet,  without  whom  our  very  con- 
ception of  human  development  would  have 
ever  been  imperfect,  this  manliest  and  truest 
and  widest  of  romances,  we  neglect  for  some 
hothouse  hybrid  of  psychological  analysis,  for 
the  wretched   imitators  of   Balzac  and   the 

^  Heart  of  Midlothian,  vol.  H.  chap.  xii.  p.  aio. 


WAVERLEY  NOVELS  171 

jackanapes  phrasemongering  of  some  Osric  of 
our  day,  who  assure  us  that  Scott  is  an  "  abso- 
lute Philistine."  It  remains,  however,  that  a 
man  may  be  greater  than  his  work.  If  there 
be  any  goodness  throughout  the  Waverley 
Novels,  it  was  the  inspiration  of  their  writer. 
They  have  added  to  the  company  of  our 
friends  many  high-spirited  women  and  many 
gallant  gentlemen,  they  have  taught  us  to 
think  more  kindly  of  human  nature  and  to 
seek  after  the  highest  things,  but  they  have 
introduced  us  to  no  braver  or  truer  man  than 
Scott  himself.  Unintoxicated  by  prosperity 
and  unbroken  in  adversity,  toiling  to  redeem 
that  dreadful  debt  while  his  wife  lay  dying, 
and  after  her  death  going  back  to  his  work 
without  any  public  moan,  he  did  his  part 
right  knightly.  With  Shakespeare  he  is  the 
chief  creative  genius  of  our  English  literature, 
and  with  Burns  he  is  the  proud  glory  of  Scots 
letters.  And  now,  if  in  jealous  affection  we 
have  complained  that  Carlyle  did  less  than 
justice  to  Scott's  work,  we  gladly  accept  his 
beautiful  tribute  to  Scott's  character.  "  When 
he  departed  he  took  a  man's  life  along  with 
him.  No  sounder  piece  of  British  manhood 
was  put  together  in  that  eighteenth  century  of 


172       BOOKS  AND  BOOKMEN 

time.  Alas,  his  fine  Scotch  face,  with  its 
shaggy  honesty,  sagacity,  and  goodness,  when 
we  saw  it  latterly  on  the  Edinburgh  streets, 
was  all  worn  with  care,  the  joy  all  fled  from 
it:  ploughed  deep  with  labour  and  sorrow. 
We  shall  never  forget  it;  we  shall  never  see  it 
again.  Adieu,  Sir  Walter,  pride  of  all  Scots- 
men, take  our  proud  and  sad  farewell." 


THE  END 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY,  LOS  ANGELES 

COLLEGE  LIBRARY 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


Rtc'o  cot.  crtf 
JUL  29^9^ 

'^fC  20  1974 


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